Chapter V: “submarine!”

They had the tail end of a southeast gale to buck against on their way out and the _Conklin_, though a much steadier ship than the older destroyers, did everything but stand on her stern. Dave put in a strenuous hour in the foretop between ten and eleven that night. Whether getting up to the cage or staying there after he was up was the worst he couldn’t decide. The destroyer was plunging straight into the huge seas, banging them down on her fo’c’sle deck in tons, slapping them against the bridge in the shape of blinding spray and even tossing the spindrift as high as the cage. She slid down into a trough, leaning far to starboard, climbed up from it, whipping her mast to port, and then crashed into a wave with a shock that made her tremble all down her slender steel length. “Rolling forty” she was that night. Dave held on with every muscle in his body as his roost dipped from side to side and then leaned sickeningly backward or forward. An hour of it was all any mortal could stand, and he was longing for his relief before his trick was half over. Never a light peeked out of the gloom, and the rushing shriek of the wind drowned even the noise of the waves pounding aboard.

But getting below again almost made up for it. A cup of piping hot coffee in the galley――there had been a time when it would have kept Dave awake, but that was before he became a destroyer “gob”――warmed his chilled body, and he clung to a table and chatted with the cook who was deftly balancing himself while he scraped the dough for to-morrow’s bread from the great mixer. Then he shed his outer clothes and climbed into his narrow bunk and, holding himself there by his eyelashes, as the saying is, heard the water sweeping past beyond a thin steel wall and the steady hum of the engines and the roar of the big boilers and the Swedish oiler known as “Yonny” whistling “Pack All Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile.” Dave heard other sounds, too, such as Merritt, of his gun crew, giving an unconscious imitation of a slide trombone in the bunk above, and the tramping of feet on the steel plates overhead and, finally, the seven quick strokes of the ship’s clock in the nearer fireroom. After that he must have gone to sleep. At least he didn’t hear the watch changed, and when he awoke the daylight was struggling with the electric bulb in the thwartship passage.

The first day on patrol was a stiff one, for the gale subsided slowly and the great, tumbling green seas tossed the destroyer about incessantly. The life-lines were kept rigged all that day and coffee was the only hot thing obtainable, since cooking when the range slanted at forty degrees to port one minute and forty degrees to starboard the next minute was out of the question. But hot coffee there was in plenty, and some of the men, foresighted persons who had laid in supplies at Queenstown, boiled eggs at the steam vents. But nothing happened. Now and then a porpoise startled a lookout by his famous impersonation of a “moldie,” which is a torpedo in plain English, and terns and gulls squawked sorrowfully overhead or splashed at the foamy summit of a big wave. All day the _Conklin_ ranged back and forth, up and down, sometimes passing the time of day with a distant patrol, but for the most part minding her own business very thoroughly, for the sufficient reason that no other business offered.

There was less roll that night and sleep was not so much a gymnastic performance, and the second day broke warmer and stiller, with only long surges to climb up and down. The sun came out shortly after morning chow and dried the wet decks and made warm and cosy corners for idle gobs to re-read their latest home letters in. Life-lines came down along the deck and one could walk from jackstaff to stern post without risking life. Dave was hunched on the deck beside No. 2 gun, in a patch of sunlight, writing to his mother, when a rude interruption came in the shape of a sharp cry from the bridge above, and a moment later the sounding of general quarters. As he had his life-vest on already he had only to thrust paper and pencil into his pocket and climb to his feet to reach his station. Having done that he leaned from the port and had a look for the cause of the excitement. Nothing, however, showed on so much of the ocean as was visible from No. 2 gun port, and it was the Human Trombone――otherwise Alf Merritt――who supplied the desired information as he hurried to his station.

“Periscope about half a mile off the starboard beam,” he explained a trifle breathlessly, being plainly anxious to tell it before the other arrived. “We all saw it. They say it’s a big one, the sub, I mean. There were two ‘sticks’ about twelve feet apart.”

The rest of the crew interrupted Merritt’s narrative and Dave was too busy with his duties to ask more.

The _Conklin_ spouted heavy black smoke from her four funnels, swung around on her heel and raced westward. But the periscope was gone, had, in fact, disappeared too soon for a shot to be fired at it, and even depth charges were of questionable value. Dave had more than half expected to hear the rending crash of a torpedo, but either the sub had not discharged one or it had missed its mark. A single depth charge was dropped when the destroyer had reached the approximate location of the U-boat, but it was a forlorn hope and brought no reward. For three hours the _Conklin_ ranged over a twenty-mile radius, the lookouts never so sharp-eyed, but the submarine refused to show herself again. Finally the search was given over in disappointment and disgust and the destroyer returned to her former profitless task.

Up in the wireless hutch a message was tapped off to the flagship a hundred miles away announcing the sighting of the U-boat and the incident appeared closed. Then, at half-past three in the afternoon, the same thing happened again.

This time the two periscopes were nearly a mile distant and remained in sight, moving slowly on a nearly parallel course with that of the _Conklin_ for some two minutes, during which time the destroyer again spouted smoke and dashed to the fray. But, as before, the submarine was coy and dived long before a shell could be fired. The _Conklin_ wasted four depth bombs and hung around until dark. As the second sub had been sighted seventy miles southeast of the first the impression aboard the destroyer was that they had landed in a nest of U-boats. Disgust at losing two chances in one day was mitigated by what seemed an excellent prospect of finding a third “fish”; and, as, every one knows, the third time is successful. The _Conklin_ swept eastward to the edge of her patrol territory and ranged back again. At midnight a small chaser signaled from the darkness and asked for the latest news of the enemy. She, it appeared, had been dispatched to take a hand in the search. The _Conklin_ replied with her blinker and the chaser disappeared southward. Dave’s hour aloft came in the “graveyard watch” and he found more thrill than usual in his task. But his night glasses failed to show anything more than a far-distant light that flickered for a moment in the west and went out. It might have been a signal from a patrol or the stern light on an incautious steamer. At all events, it didn’t appear again and Dave climbed down the shroud disappointedly.

The next morning at an hour or so after the half-hearted dawn of a gray day the foretop lookout again electrified the bridge.

“Submarine awash broad off the port bow. About two miles, sir.”

The frenzied general quarters alarm hooted through the ship. Buckets and swabs, brushes and cloths were stowed and the crew sprang eagerly to stations. The _Conklin_ swept her sharp nose around and went piling south southeast, leaving a cream-white path of tumbling foam behind her.

“She has no conning tower, sir,” called down the foretop spotter. “I think there’s some one on deck.”

“One of U-54 class,” commented the Old Man. “I’ve got her now. Yes, down through the hatch again. Ready with that No. 2 gun? What’s the range?”

But even the five-inch was outdistanced as yet, and there was an anxious period while the _Conklin_ fairly leaped through the sea. Every instant they expected to see the darker object, that looked like a sunning whale against the light and shadow of the tumbling waters ahead, disappear from their sight as mysteriously as it had appeared.

“Fourteen thousand yards,” announced the fire control.

“She’s stopped her engines, sir.”

“What’s your speed?” demanded the Old Man impatiently at the engine room tube.

“Thirty-three-forty-five, sir!”

“Hit her up! Bust her!”

“Thirteen thousand five hundred!”

“There’s something on the for’ard periscope, sir! Looks like a flag!”

“So there is! What do you make of it, lieutenant?”

“Flag, sir, and――and I think it’s white!”

“White! White!” sputtered the captain. “What’s it for? Who ever heard――”

“Yes, it’s white. It’s wet and is half wrapped about the ‘stick.’”

“Some infernal German trick, I suppose!”

“Shall we try a shot?”

“No――no. Hang it, you can’t fire on a white flag!” He called for slower speed and the _Conklin_ eased up as she split her way through the dancing waves. The sun shot a long streamer of pale amber light through the gray clouds to eastward. “We’ll have to see,” muttered the captain. “She’s broad on, and I don’t think her class carries broadside tubes, but we won’t chance it.”

The _Conklin_ swung to starboard and presently back to port and so continued the journey zig-zagging. The submarine drew nearer and nearer. She was lying motionless save for the pitching and rolling caused by the waves, with both periscopes extended and a piece of dirty wet white cloth fluttering weakly from the forward one. There was no sign of life aboard, but those on the _Conklin_ realized uneasily that they were being closely watched through the periscopes. That the Hun was up to some trick was the general belief on bridge and deck, and when the _Conklin_ slowed and finally stopped some yards away from the long, sinister, gray steel hull every available gun was ranged upon it. The Old Man stepped to the edge of the bridge and put megaphone to mouth, and at that instant a round hatch opened in the middle of the slightly raised deck that took the place of a conning tower and a head appeared. The captain waited. The man climbed through and as he did so he raised his arms above his head in token of surrender. The _Conklin_ looked on in surprise not unleavened with suspicion. On the heels of the first man appeared a second, and then a third, and a fourth, and each held his arms up and moved out on the unsteady deck to make place for others. How they managed to keep their feet on that wet, slippery, heaving surface was a marvel. Man after man appeared until the deck was clustered with them. Commander Gannett recovered from his amazement and raised his megaphone again.

“Where is your captain?” he asked.

There was no answer for a moment. Then a sailor pushed himself perilously forward. “Kamerad!” he shouted back. “Kamerad!”

“There isn’t an officer in the lot,” muttered the executive at the captain’s shoulder. “Deuced funny, eh?”

“Speak English?” bawled the captain, raising his voice in the unconscious way that one does in the circumstances.

Again silence. The men on the U-boat’s deck seemed to be talking among themselves. Then a regular chorus of “Kamerad! Kamerad!” floated across the water. The Old Man shrugged his shoulders.

“Lower a boat and see what their game is. Pass the word to the lookouts to keep their eyes peeled. There may be another Hun around. Have we any one aboard who speaks their rotten language?”

“Ensign Whittemore, sir.”

“Ask him to take charge and see what’s the matter over there. Never heard of a sub insisting on surrender like this. There’s something wrong somewhere!”

Over went Number One boat and the ensign and eight husky gobs sprang into it and were lowered away. “Let go!” ordered the officer in the stern sheets. “Give way!” The oars dipped and the boat headed for the submarine. The Pickle pulled an oar in that boat and we’ll let him tell the story now as he told it to a group on the lower deck afterward.