E2 was a wet, strained, and uncomfortable boat for
the rest of her cruise. She sank steamers, burned
dhows; was worried by torpedo-boats and hunted by
Hun planes; hit bottom freely and frequently; silenced
forts that fired at her from lonely beaches; warned
villages who might have joined in the game that they
had better keep to farming; shelled railway lines
and stations; would have shelled a pier, but found
there was a hospital built at one end of it, “so
could not bombard”; came upon dhows crowded
with “female refugees” which she “allowed
to proceed,” and was presented with fowls in
return; but through it all her chief preoccupation
was that racked and strained gun and mounting.
When there was nothing else doing she reports sourly
that she “worked on gun.” As a philosopher
of the lower deck put it: “’Tisn’t
what you blanky do that matters, it’s
what you blanky have to do.” In other
words, worry, not work, kills.
E2’s gun did its best to knock the heart out
of them all. She had to shift the wretched thing
twice; once because the bolts that held it down were
smashed (the wire hawser must have pretty well pulled
it off its seat), and again because the hull beneath
it leaked on pressure. She went down to make
sure of it. But she drilled and tapped and adjusted,
till in a short time the gun worked again and killed
steamers as it should. Meanwhile, the whole boat
leaked. All the plates under the old gun-position
forward leaked; she leaked aft through damaged hydroplane
guards, and on her way home they had to keep the water
down by hand pumps while she was diving through the
nets. Where she did not leak outside she leaked
internally, tank leaking into tank, so that the petrol
got into the main fresh-water supply and the men had
to be put on allowance. The last pint was served
out when she was in the narrowest part of the Narrows,
a place where one’s mouth may well go dry of
a sudden.
Here for the moment the records end. I have been
at some pains not to pick and choose among them.
So far from doctoring or heightening any of the incidents,
I have rather understated them; but I hope I have
made it clear that through all the haste and fury of
these multiplied actions, when life and death and
destruction turned on the twitch of a finger, not
one life of any non-combatant was wittingly taken.
They were carefully picked up or picked out, taken
below, transferred to boats, and despatched or personally
conducted in the intervals of business to the safe,
unexploding beach. Sometimes they part from their
chaperones “with many expressions of good will,”
at others they seem greatly relieved and rather surprised
at not being knocked on the head after the custom
of their Allies. But the boats with a hundred
things on their minds no more take credit for their
humanity than their commanders explain the feats for
which they won their respective decorations.
