CHAPTER VIII
FIRST BLOOD
When they got to the end of the Railway Pier where the pinnace was lyingpanting and puffing, a Flag-Lieutenant touched his cap to Erskine, tookhim by the arm and led him aside. He took an envelope out of his pocketand said, in a low tone:
"Here are your instructions, Erskine. They've jumped on us a bit morequickly than we thought they would, but the Commander-in-Chief trusts toyou and your ship to do the needful. The position is this: one divisionof the Russian, German and Dutch fleets is making a combined attack onHull and Newcastle. Two other divisions are going for the mouth of theThames, and the North Sea Squadron is going to look after them. TheFrench North Sea Squadron is making a rush on Dover, and will get veryconsiderably pounded in the process. Two French fleets from Cherbourgand Brest are coming up Channel, and each of them has a screen oftorpedo boats and destroyers. The Southern Fleet Reserve is concentratedhere and at Portland. The Channel Fleet is outside, and we hope to getit in their rear, so that we'll have them between the ships and theforts. If we do, they'll have just about as hot a time of it as anybodywants.
"As far as we've been able to learn, the French are going to try Togo'stactics at Port Arthur, and rush Portsmouth with the small craft. You'llfind that it's your business to look after them. Sink, smash andgenerally destroy. Go for everything you see. There isn't a craft ofours within twenty miles outside. Good-bye, and good luck to you!"
"Good-bye!" said Erskine, as they shook hands, "and if we don't comeback, give my love to the Lords of the Admiralty and thank them forgiving me the chance with the _Ithuriel_. Bye-bye!"
Their hands gripped again and the captain of the _Ithuriel_ ran down thesteps like a boy going to a picnic.
The pinnace gave a little squeak from its siren and sped away down theharbour between the two forts, in which the gunners were standing by thenew fourteen-inch wire-wound guns, whose long chases were prevented fromdrooping after continuous discharge by an ingenious application of theprinciple of the cantilever bridge, invented by the creator of the_Ithuriel_. In the breech-chamber of each of them was a thousand-poundshell, carrying a bursting charge of five hundred pounds of an explosivewhich was an improvement on blasting gelatine, and the guns were capableof throwing these to a distance of twelve miles with precision. Theywere the most formidable weapons either ashore or afloat.
Just outside the harbour the pinnace swung round to the westward and ina few minutes stopped alongside the _Ithuriel_.
As far as Lennard could see she was neither cruiser nor destroyer norsubmarine, but a sort of compound of all three. She did not appear to bea steamer because she had no funnels. She was not exactly a submarinebecause she had a signal-mast forward and carried five long,ugly-looking guns, three ahead and two astern, of a type that he hadnever seen before. Forward of the mast there was a conning-tower of ovalshape, with the lesser curves fore and aft. The breech-ends of the gunswere covered by a long hood of steel, apparently of great thickness, andthat was all.
As soon as they got on board Erskine said to Lennard:
"Come into the conning-tower with me. I believe we can make use of thisinvention of yours at once. I've got a pretty well-fitted laboratorydown below and we might have a try. But you must excuse me a moment, Iwill just run through this."
He opened the envelope containing his instructions, put them down onthe little desk in front of him and then read a note that was enclosedwith them.
"By Jove," he said, "they're pretty quick up at headquarters. You'llhave to excuse me a minute or two, Mr Lennard. Just stand on that side,will you, please? Close up, we haven't too much room here. Good-bye forthe present."
In front of the desk and above the little steering-wheel there was amahogany board studded with two sets of ivory buttons, disposed in twolines of six each. He touched one of these, and Lennard saw himdisappear through the floor of the conning-tower. Within a few momentsthe portion of the floor upon which he had stood returned to its place,and Lennard said to himself:
"If the rest of her works like that, she ought to be a lovely study inengineering."
While Captain Erskine is communicating his instructions to his second incommand, and arranging the details of the coming fight, there will betime to give a brief description of the craft on board of which Lennardso unexpectedly found himself, and which an invention of his own wasdestined to make even more formidable than it was.
To put it as briefly as possible, the _Ithuriel_ was a combination ofdestroyer, cruiser, submarine and ram, and she had cost Erskine threeyears of hard work to think out. She was three hundred feet long, fiftyfeet broad, and thirty feet from her upper keel to her deck. This was ofcourse an abnormal depth for a vessel of her length, but then the_Ithuriel_ was quite an abnormal warship. One-third of her depthconsisted of a sinking-chamber, protected by twelve-inch armour, andthis chamber could be filled in a few minutes with four thousand tons ofwater. This is of course the same thing as saying she had twowaterlines. The normal cruising line gave her a freeboard of ten feet.Above the sinking-tanks her vitals were protected by ten-inch armour. Inshort, as regards armour, she was an entire reversal of the ordinarytype of warship, and she had the advantage of being impervious totorpedo attack. Loaded torpedoes had been fired at her and had burstlike eggs against a wall, with no more effect than to make her heel overa few degrees to the other side. Submarines had attacked her and gottheir noses badly bruised in the process. It was, indeed, admitted bythe experts of the Admiralty that under water she was impregnable.
Her propelling power consisted of four sets of engines, all well belowthe waterline. Three of these drove three propellers astern: the fourthdrove a suction screw which revolved just underneath the ram. This was amass of steel weighing fifty tons and curved upwards like the invertedbeak of an eagle. Erskine had taken this idea from the Russianice-breakers which had been designed by the Russian Admiral Makaroff andbuilt at Elswick. The screw was protected by a steel grating of whichthe forward protecting girder completed the curve of the stem. Aft,there was a similar ram, weighing thirty tons and a like protection tothe after-screws.
The driving power was derived from a combination of petrol andpulverised smokeless coal, treated with liquid oxygen, which madecombustion practically perfect. There was no boilers or furnaces, onlycombustion chambers, and this fact made the carrying of the great weightof armour under the waterline possible. The speed of the _Ithuriel_ wasforty-five knots ahead when all four screws were driving and pulling,and thirty knots astern when they were reversed. Her total capacity wasfive thousand two hundred tons.
Behind the three forward guns was a dome-shaped conning-tower ofnine-inch steel, hardened like the rest of the armour by an improvementon the Harvey process. Above the conning-tower were two searchlightprojectors, both capable of throwing a clear ray to a distance of fourmiles and controlled from within the conning-tower.
"Well, I am afraid I have kept you waiting, Mr Lennard," said Erskine,as the platform brought him up again into the conning-tower, in muchshorter time than was necessary to make this needful description of whatwas probably the most formidable craft in the British Navy. "We're offnow. I've fitted up half a dozen shells with that diabolical inventionof yours. If we run across a battleship or a cruiser, we'll try them. Ithink our friends the enemy will find them somewhat of a paralyser, andthere's nothing like beginning pretty strong."
"Nothing like hitting them hard at first, and I hope that those thingsof mine will be what I think they are, and unless all my theories arequite wrong, I fancy you'll find them all right."
"They would be the first theories of yours that have gone wrong, MrLennard," replied Erskine, "but anyhow, we shall soon see. I have putthree of your shells in the forward guns. We'll try them there first,and if they're all right we'll use the other three. I've got the afterguns loaded with my own shell, so if we come across anything big, weshall be able to try them against each other. At present, myinstructions are to deal with the lighter craft only: destroyers an
dthat sort of thing, you know."
"But don't you fire on them?" said Lennard. "What would happen if theygot a torpedo under you?"
"Well," said Erskine, "as a matter of fact I don't think destroyers areworth shooting at. Our guns are meant for bigger game. But it's no goodtrying to explain things now. You'll see, pretty soon, and you'll learnmore in half an hour than I could tell you in four hours."
They were clear of the harbour by this time and running out at about tenknots between the two old North and South Spithead forts on the top ofeach of which one of the new fourteen-inch thousand-pounders had beenmounted on disappearing carriages.
"Now," he continued, "if we're going to find them anywhere, we shallfind them here, or hereabouts. My orders are to smash everything that Ican get at."
"Fairly comprehensive," said Lennard.
"Yes, Lennard, and it's an order that I'm going to fill. We may as wellquicken up a bit now. You understand, Castellan is looking after theguns, and his sub., Mackenzie is communicating orders to my ChiefEngineer, who looks after the speed."
"And the speed?" asked Lennard.
"I'll leave you to judge that when we get to business," said Erskine,putting his forefinger on one of the buttons on the left-hand side ofthe board as he spoke.
The next moment Lennard felt the rubber-covered floor of theconning-tower jump under his feet. All the coast lights wereextinguished but there was a half-moon and he saw the outlines of theshore slip away faster behind them. The eastern heights of the Isle ofWight loomed up like a cloud and dropped away astern.
"Pretty fast, that," he said.
"Only twenty-five knots," replied Erskine, as he gave the steering-wheela very gentle movement and swung the _Ithuriel's_ head round to theeastward. "If these chaps are going to make a rush in the way Togo didat Port Arthur, they've got to do it between Selsey Bill and NettlestonePoint. If they're mad enough to try the other way between Round TowerPoint and Hurst Castle, they'll get blown out of the water in very smallpieces, so we needn't worry about them there. Our business is to keepthem out of this side. Ah, look now, there are two or three of themthere. See, ahead of the port bow. We'll tackle these gentlemen first."
Lennard looked out through the narrow semicircular window of six-inchcrystal glass running across the front of the conning-tower, which wasalmost as strong as steel, and saw three little dark, moving spots onthe half-moonlit water, about two miles ahead, stealing up in lineabreast.
"Those chaps are trying to get in between the Spithead forts," saidErskine. "They're slowed down to almost nothing, waiting for the cloudsto come over the moon, and then they'll make a dash for it. At least,they think they will. I don't."
As he spoke he gave another turn to the steering-wheel and touchedanother button. The _Ithuriel_ leapt forward again and swung about threepoints to the eastward. In three minutes she was off Black Point, andthis movement brought her into a straight line with the threedestroyers. He gave the steering-wheel another half turn and her headswung round in a short quarter circle. He put his finger on to thebottom button on the right-hand side of the signal board and said toLennard:
"Hold tight now, she's going."
Lennard held tight, for he felt the floor jump harder under him thistime.
In the dim light he saw the nearest of the destroyers, as it seemed tohim, rush towards them sideways. Erskine touched another button. Ashudder ran through the fabric of the _Ithuriel_ and her bow rose abovefive feet from the water. A couple of minutes later it hit the destroyeramidships, rolled her over, broke her in two like a log of wood, amidsta roar of crackling guns and a scream of escaping steam, went over herand headed for the next one.
Lennard clenched his teeth and said nothing. He was thinking too hard tosay anything just then.
The second destroyer opened fire with her twelve-and six-pounders anddropped a couple of torpedoes as the _Ithuriel_ rushed at her. The_Ithuriel_ was now travelling at forty knots an hour. The torpedoes atthirty. The combined speed was therefore nearly a hundred statute milesan hour. Erskine saw the two white shapes drop into the water, theircourses converging towards him. A half turn of the wheel to port swungthe _Ithuriel_ out and just cleared them. It was a fairly narrow shave,for one of them grated along her side, but the _Ithuriel_ had no angles.The actual result was that one of the torpedoes deflected from itscourse, hit the other one and both exploded. A mountain of foam-crownedwater rose up and the commander of the French destroyer congratulatedhimself on the annihilation of at least one of the English warships, butthe next moment the grey-blue, almost invisible shape of the _Ithuriel_leapt up out of the semi-darkness, and her long pointed ram struckamidships, cut him down to the waterline, and almost before the twohalves of his vessel had sunk the same fate had befallen the thirddestroyer.
"Well, what do you think of that?" said Erskine, as he touched a couplemore buttons and the _Ithuriel_ swung round to the eastward again.
"Well," said Lennard, slowly, "of course it's war, and those fellowswere coming in to do all the damage they could. But it is just a bitterrible, for all that. It's just seven minutes since you rammed thefirst boat: you haven't fired a shot and there are three big destroyersand I suppose three hundred and fifty men at the bottom of the sea.Pretty awful, you know."
"My dear sir," replied Erskine, without looking round, "all war is awfuland entirely horrible, and naval war is of course the most horrible ofall. There is no chance for the defeated: my orders do not even allow meto pick up a man from one of those vessels. On the other hand, one mustremember that if one of those destroyers had got in, they could have letgo half a dozen torpedoes apiece among the ships of the Fleet Reserve,and perhaps half a dozen ships and five or six thousand men might havebeen at the bottom of the Solent by this time, and those torpedoeswouldn't have had any sentiment in them. Hallo, there's another!"
A long, black shape surmounted by a signal-mast and four funnels slid upand out of the darkness into a patch of moonlight lying on the water.Erskine gave a quarter turn to the wheel and touched the two buttonsagain. The _Ithuriel_ swung round and ran down on her prey. The twofifteen-and the six twelve-pounder guns ahead and astern and on thebroadside of the destroyer crackled out and a hail of shells camewhistling across the water. A few of them struck the _Ithuriel_, glancedoff and exploded.
"There," said Erskine, "they've knocked some of our nice new paint off.Now they're going to pay for it."
"Couldn't you give them a shot back?" said Lennard.
"Not worth it, my dear sir," said Erskine. "We keep our guns for biggergame. We haven't an angle that a shell would hit. You might just as wellfire boiled peas at a hippopotamus as those little things at us. Ofcourse a big shell square amidships would hurt us, but then she's sohandy that I think I could stop it hitting her straight."
While he was speaking the _Ithuriel_ got up to full speed again. Lennardshut his eyes. He felt a slight shock, and then a dull grinding. A crashof guns and a roar of escaping steam, and when he looked out again, thedestroyer had disappeared. The next moment a blinding glare of lightstreamed across the water from the direction of Selsey.
"A big cruiser, or battleship," said Erskine. "French or German. Nowwe'll see what those shells of yours are made of."
The World Peril of 1910 Page 9
