Roughly, very roughly, speaking, our destroyers enjoyed
three phases of “prompt decisive action”—the
first, a period of daylight attacks (from 4 to 6 P.M.)
such as the one I have just described, while the battle
was young and the light fairly good on the afternoon
of May 31; the second, towards dark, when the light
had lessened and the enemy were more uneasy, and,
I think, in more scattered formation; the third, when
darkness had fallen, and the destroyers had been strung
out astern with orders to help the enemy home, which
they did all night as opportunity offered. One
cannot say whether the day or the night work was the
more desperate. From private advices, the young
gentlemen concerned seem to have functioned with efficiency
either way. As one of them said: “After
a bit, you see, we were all pretty much on our own,
and you could really find out what your ship could
do.”
I will tell you later of a piece of night work not
without merit.
THE NIGHT HUNT
As I said, we will confine ourselves to something
quite sane and simple which does not involve more
than half-a-dozen different reports.
When the German fleet ran for home, on the night of
May 31, it seems to have scattered—“starred,”
I believe, is the word for the evolution—in
a general sauve qui peut, while the Devil, livelily
represented by our destroyers, took the hindmost.
Our flotillas were strung out far and wide on this
job. One man compared it to hounds hunting half
a hundred separate foxes.
I take the adventures of several couples of destroyers
who, on the night of May 31, were nosing along somewhere
towards the Schleswig-Holstein coast, ready to chop
any Hun-stuff coming back to earth by that particular
road. The leader of one line was Gehenna, and
the next two ships astern of her were Eblis and Shaitan,
in the order given. There were others, of course,
but with the exception of one Goblin they don’t
come violently into this tale. There had been
a good deal of promiscuous firing that evening, and
actions were going on all round. Towards midnight
our destroyers were overtaken by several three-and
four-funnel German ships (cruisers they thought) hurrying
home. At this stage of the game anybody might
have been anybody—pursuer or pursued.
The Germans took no chances, but switched on their
searchlights and opened fire on Gehenna. Her acting
sub-lieutenant reports: “A salvo hit us
forward. I opened fire with the after-guns.
A shell then struck us in a steam-pipe, and I could
see nothing but steam. But both starboard torpedo-tubes
were fired.”
