The Trade has many stories, too, of watching patrols
when a boat must see chance after chance go by under
her nose and write—merely write—what
she has seen. Naturally they do not appear in
any accessible records. Nor, which is a pity,
do the authorities release the records of glorious
failures, when everything goes wrong; when torpedoes
break surface and squatter like ducks; or arrive full
square with a clang and burst of white water and—fail
to explode; when the devil is in charge of all the
motors, and clutches develop play that would scare
a shore-going mechanic bald; when batteries begin to
give off death instead of power, and atop of all,
ice or wreckage of the strewn seas racks and wrenches
the hull till the whole leaking bag of tricks limps
home on six missing cylinders and one ditto propeller,
plus the indomitable will of the red-eyed husky
scarecrows in charge.
There might be worse things in this world for decent
people to read than such records.
BUSINESS IN THE SEA OF MARMARA
This war is like an iceberg. We, the public,
only see an eighth of it above water. The rest
is out of sight and, as with the berg, one guesses
its extent by great blocks that break off and shoot
up to the surface from some underlying out-running
spur a quarter of a mile away. So with this war
sudden tales come to light which reveal unsuspected
activities in unexpected quarters. One takes it
for granted such things are always going on somewhere,
but the actual emergence of the record is always astonishing.
Once upon a time, there were certain E type boats
who worked the Sea of Marmara with thoroughness and
humanity; for the two, in English hands, are compatible.
The road to their hunting-grounds was strewn with
peril, the waters they inhabited were full of eyes
that gave them no rest, and what they lost or expended
in wear and tear of the chase could not be made good
till they had run the gauntlet to their base again.
The full tale of their improvisations and “makee-does”
will probably never come to light, though fragments
can be picked up at intervals in the proper places
as the men concerned come and go. The Admiralty
gives only the bones, but those are not so dry, of
the boat’s official story.
When E14, Commander E. Courtney-Boyle, went to her
work in the Sea of Marmara, she, like her sister,
“proceeded” on her gas-engine up the Dardanelles;
and a gas-engine by night between steep cliffs has
been described by the Lower-deck as a “full
brass band in a railway cutting.” So a
fort picked her up with a searchlight and missed her
with artillery. She dived under the minefield
that guarded the Straits, and when she rose at dawn
in the narrowest part of the channel, which is about
one mile and a half across, all the forts fired at
her. The water, too, was thick with steamboat
patrols, out of which E14 selected a Turkish gunboat
and gave her a torpedo. She had just time to
see the great column of water shoot as high as the
gunboat’s mast when she had to dip again as “the
men in a small steamboat were leaning over trying
to catch hold of the top of my periscope.”
