Chance sent me almost immediately after the Jutland fight a Lieutenant of one of the destroyers engaged. Among other matters, I asked him if there was any particular noise.
"Well, I haven't been in the trenches, of course," he replied, "but I don't think there could have been much more noise than there was."
This bears out a report of a destroyer who could not be certain whether an enemy battleship had blown up or not, saying that, in that particular corner, it would have been impossible to identify anything less than the explosion of a whole magazine.
"It wasn't exactly noise," he reflected. "Noise is what you take in from outside. This was inside you. It seemed to lift you right out of everything."
"And how did the light affect one?" I asked, trying to work out a theory that noise and light produced beyond known endurance form an unknown anaesthetic and stimulant, comparable to, but infinitely more potent than, the soothing effect of the smoke-pall of ancient battles.
"The lights were rather curious," was the answer. "I don't know that one noticed searchlights particularly, unless they meant business; but when a lot of big guns loosed off together, the whole sea was lit up and you could see our destroyers running about like cockroaches on a tin soup-plate."
"Then is black the best colour for our destroyers? Some commanders seem to think we ought to use grey."
"Blessed if I know," said young Dante. "Everything shows black in that light. Then it all goes out again with a bang. Trying for the eyes if you are spotting."
Ship Dogs
"And how did the dogs take it?" I pursued. There are several destroyers more or less owned by pet dogs, who start life as the chance-found property of a stoker, and end in supreme command of the bridge.
"Most of 'em didn't like it a bit. They went below one time, and wanted to be loved. They knew it wasn't ordinary practice."
"What did Arabella do?" I had heard a good deal of Arabella.
"Oh, Arabella's quite different. Her job has always been to look after her master's pyjamas—folded up at the head of the bunk, you know. She found out pretty soon the bridge was no place for a lady, so she hopped downstairs and got in. You know how she makes three little jumps to it—first, on to the chair; then on the flap-table, and then up on the pillow. When the show was over, there she was as usual."
"Was she glad to see her master?"
"Ra-ather. Arabella was the bold, gay lady-dog then!"
Now Arabella is between nine and eleven and a half inches long.
"Does the Hun run to pets at all?"
"I shouldn't say so. He's an unsympathetic felon—the Hun. But he might cherish a dachshund or so. We never picked up any ships' pets off him, and I'm sure we should if there had been."
That I believed as implicitly as the tale of a destroyer attack some months ago, the object of which was to flush Zeppelins. It succeeded, for the flotilla was attacked by several. Right in the middle of the flurry, a destroyer asked permission to stop and lower dinghy to pick up ship's dog which had fallen overboard. Permission was granted, and the dog was duly rescued. "Lord knows what the Hun made of it," said my informant. "He was rumbling round, dropping bombs; and the dinghy was digging out for all she was worth, and the Dog-Fiend was swimming for Dunkirk. It must have looked rather mad from above. But they saved the Dog-Fiend, and then everybody swore he was a German spy in disguise."
The Fight
"And—about this Jutland fight?" I hinted, not for the first time.
"Oh, that was just a fight. There was more of it than any other fight, I suppose, but I expect all modern naval actions must be pretty much the same."
"But what does one do—how does one feel?" I insisted, though I knew it was hopeless.
"One does one's job. Things are happening all the time. A man may be right under your nose one minute—serving a gun or something—and the next minute he isn't there."
"And one notices that at the time?"
"Yes. But there's no time to keep on noticing it. You've got to carry on somehow or other, or your show stops. I tell you what one does notice, though. If one goes below for anything, or has to pass through a flat somewhere, and one sees the old wardroom clock ticking, or a photograph pinned up, or anything of that sort, one notices that. Oh yes, and there was another thing—the way a ship seemed to blow up if you were far off her. You'd see a glare, then a blaze, and then the smoke—miles high, lifting quite slowly. Then you'd get the row and the jar of it—just like bumping over submarines. Then, a long while after p'raps, you run through a regular rain of bits of burnt paper coming down on the decks—like showers of volcanic ash, you know." The door of the operating-room seemed just about to open, but it shut again.
"And the Huns' gunnery?"
"That was various. Sometimes they began quite well, and went to pieces after they'd been strafed a little; but sometimes they picked up again. There was one Hun-boat that got no end of a hammering, and it seemed to do her gunnery good. She improved tremendously till we sank her. I expect we'd knocked out some scientific Hun in the controls, and he'd been succeeded by a man who knew how."
It used to be "Fritz" last year when they spoke of the enemy. Now it is Hun or, as I have heard, "Yahun," being a superlative of Yahoo. In the Napoleonic wars we called the Frenchmen too many names for any one of them to endure; but this is the age of standardisation.
"And what about our Lower Deck?" I continued.
"They? Oh, they carried on as usual. It takes a lot to impress the Lower Deck when they're busy." And he mentioned several little things that confirmed this. They had a great deal to do, and they did it serenely because they had been trained to carry on under all conditions without panicking. What they did in the way of running repairs was even more wonderful, if that be possible, than their normal routine.
The Lower Deck nowadays is full of strange fish with unlooked-for accomplishments, as in the recorded case of two simple seamen of a destroyer who, when need was sorest, came to the front as trained experts in first-aid.
"And now—what about the actual Hun losses at Jutland?" I ventured.
"You've seen the list, haven't you?"
"Yes, but it occurred to me—that they might have been a shade under-estimated, and I thought perhaps—"
A perfectly plain asbestos fire-curtain descended in front of the already locked door. It was none of his business to dispute the drive. If there were any discrepancies between estimate and results, one might be sure that the enemy knew about them, which was the chief thing that mattered.
It was, said he, Joss that the light was so bad at the hour of the last round-up when our main fleet had come down from the north and shovelled the Hun round on his tracks. Per contra, had it been any other kind of weather, the odds were the Hun would not have ventured so far. As it was, the Hun's fleet had come out and gone back again, none the better for air and exercise. We must be thankful for what we had managed to pick up. But talking of picking up, there was an instance of almost unparalleled Joss which had stuck in his memory.