This sentence, which might have come out of a French
exercise book, is all Lieutenant-Commander Courtney-Boyle
sees fit to tell, and that officer will never understand
why one taxpayer at least demands his arrest after
the war till he shall have given the full tale.
Did he sight the shadowy underline of the small steamboat
green through the deadlights? Or did she suddenly
swim into his vision from behind, and obscure, without
warning, his periscope with a single brown clutching
hand? Was she alone, or one of a mob of splashing,
shouting small craft? He may well have been too
busy to note, for there were patrols all around him,
a minefield of curious design and undefined area somewhere
in front, and steam trawlers vigorously sweeping for
him astern and ahead. And when E14 had burrowed
and bumped and scraped through six hours of blind
death, she found the Sea of Marmara crawling with
craft, and was kept down almost continuously and grew
hot and stuffy in consequence. Nor could she charge
her batteries in peace, so at the end of another hectic,
hunted day of starting them up and breaking off and
diving—which is bad for the temper—she
decided to quit those infested waters near the coast
and charge up somewhere off the traffic routes.
This accomplished, after a long, hot run, which did
the motors no good, she went back to her beat, where
she picked up three destroyers convoying a couple
of troopships. But it was a glassy calm and the
destroyers “came for me.” She got
off a long-range torpedo at one transport, and ducked
before she could judge results. She apologises
for this on the grounds that one of her periscopes
had been damaged—not, as one would expect,
by the gentleman leaning out of the little steamboat,
but by some casual shot—calibre not specified—the
day before. “And so,” says E14, “I
could not risk my remaining one being bent.”
However, she heard a thud, and the depth-gauges—those
great clock-hands on the white-faced circles—“flicked,”
which is another sign of dreadful certainty down under.
When she rose again she saw a destroyer convoying
one burning transport to the nearest beach. That
afternoon she met a sister-boat (now gone to Valhalla),
who told her that she was almost out of torpedoes,
and they arranged a rendezvous for next day, but “before
we could communicate we had to dive, and I did not
see her again.” There must be many such
meetings in the Trade, under all skies—boat
rising beside boat at the point agreed upon for interchange
of news and materials; the talk shouted aloud with
the speakers’ eyes always on the horizon and
all hands standing by to dive, even in the middle
of a sentence.
ANNOYING PATROL SHIPS
Copyrights
Sea Warfare from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
