lO 
Liiiid Si Water 
March 7, rgi8 
never were battleships more determined to drive straiglit 
through seas. Both of them had something of their way 
in the end, and neither entirely balked the other ; hut, 
drawn as it was, that battle royal of Titans was a sight for 
the gods. 
The battleships" we're in line abreast !is I came up on deck, 
and holding a course which brought the wind and seas 
abeam. \\'e were all rolling heavily, but with the rolls not 
sufficiently "synchronized" \vith the waves — which were 
charging down without much order or rhythm — to keep 
from dipping them up by the ton. If the port rail was low 
— as happened when the ship was .sliding down off the back 
of the last wave — the next wave rolled aboard, and (save 
where the mast, funnels, and higher works amidships blocked 
the way) drove right on across and off the other side. If 
the port side had rolled high as an impetuous sea struck, the 
latter expended its full force against the ship, communicating 
a jar from foretop to stokt-holds as strong as the shock of a 
collision with another vessel. 
Our own quarter-deck was constantly swept with solid 
green water, and even the higher fo'c'sle deck caught enough 
of the splash-up to make traversing it a precarious operation. 
But it was only by watching one of the other ships that it 
was possible to see how the thing really happened. If it 
was the wallowing monster abeam to port, the strikini; of a 
sea was signalized by sudden spurts of spray shooting into 
the air all the way along her windward side, the clouds of 
flying water often going over the funnels and bridge, and not 
far short of the foretop. She would give a sort of shuddering 
stumble as the weight of the impact made itself felt, and 
then— running from bow to stern and broken only by the 
upper works, and occasionally, but not always, by the 
turrets— a ragged line of foam' appeared, quickly resolving 
itself into three or four hundred feet of streaking cascades 
which came pouring down over the starboard side into the 
sea. Watching the vessel abeam to starboard, the phenom- 
enon was repeated in reverse order. Save for the swaying 
foretop against the sky, either sjpp at the moment of being 
swept by a wa\'e v\as suggestive of nothing so much as a 
great isolated black rock on a storm-bound coast. 
There were a number of other shi})s in difficulties in fiuit 
neck of the North Sea at this moment, and every now and 
then —by the wireless— word would come to us from one of 
»r._ii-. il_ 1-- A 4.1... 1 : 1,..A i__. _ 
Fighting in Bad Weather 
But the most remarkable thing about it all was the aston- 
ishingly small effect this really heavy weather had upon the 
handlmg of the ships. Evidently they had been built to 
withstand weather as well as to fight, for thev manoeuvred 
and changed formation with almost the same meticulous 
exactitude as in protected waters. A gunnery officer assured 
me that— except for momentary interference in training 
some of the lighter guns— the fighting efficiency of the ship 
would hardly be affected more than a fraction of i per cent 
by all their plungings and the clouds of flying spray Their 
speed was, naturally, somewhat diminished in bucking into 
a head sea, yet no lack of seaworthiness would prevent 
(should the need arise) their being driven into' that same 
head sea at the full power of their mighty engines The 
reason we were proceeding at somewhat ' reduced speed 
was to ease things off a bit for the destroyers. 
Ah ! And what of the destroyers ? there they all were 
the faithful sheep-dogs, when I came up, and at 'first blush 
1 got the impression that they were making rather better 
weather of it than the battleships. That this was only an 
optical illusion (caused by the fact that they were farther 
away and more or less obscured by the waves) I discovered 
as soon as I climbed to the vantage of the after super- 
structure, and put my glass upon the nearest of the bobbins 
silhouettes of mast and funnel. Then I saw at once though 
not, indeed, any such spray clouds or cascades of solid water 
as marked the course of the battleships that she was plainly 
a labourmg ship. A destroyer is not made to pulverize 
a wave m the bull-at-a-gatc fashion of a battleship and 
any exigency that compels her to adopt that method of 
progression IS likely to be attended by serious consequences 
If one of the modern type she will ride out almost any 
storm that blows if left to her own devices ; but force her 
into It at anything above half-speed, and it is asking for 
trouble. Even before the destroyer I was watching began 
hsappearing -hull, funnels, and ail but the mastheads-- 
th^rhTt.^'f ^"''. T'' "^ '^' onrushing ^^•aves, it was plain 
that both she and her sisters were having all they wanted • 
and 1 was not surprised when word was flashed "to us that 
one of our brave little watch-dogs was suffering from a wave- 
^ornnrfif'^'-^''""^ geai. and asked for permission to make 
or poi t If nece.ssaiy. I he permission was, I believe granted 
but— carrying on with some sort of a makeshift or other- ' 
Ihro'ugh to ttS."""'"' ^" ''"''' '' ""^ ^'"^ ^^■^" *'- g-- 
them. Slostly they were beyond the horizon, but two were 
in sight. One (two smoke-blackened "jiggers" and a bobbing 
funnel-tojj beneath a bituminous blur to the cast) was aj>par- 
ently a thousand-ton freighter. An officer told me that 
she had been signalling persistently since daybreak for 
assistance ; but when I asked him if we were not going to 
help her, he greeted the question with an indulgent smile. 
"Assistance will go to her in due course," he said, "but it 
will not be from us. That kind 6f a thing might have been 
done in the first month or two of the war, but the Huns 
soon made it impossible. Now, any battleship that would 
detach a destroyer at the call of any ship of doubtful identity 
would be considered as deliberately asking fur what she 
might jolly well get — a torpedo. ' 
.\nother ship which was plainly having a bad time was 
some kind of a cruiser whose long rpw of funnels was punching 
holes in a segment of sky-line. There was a suggestion of 
messiness forward, but nothing we attached any import- 
ance to until word was wirelessed that she had just had her 
bridge carried away by a heavy sea, and that the navigating 
officer had been severely injured. The latter was known 
personally to several of the ward-room officers, and at^ lunch 
speculation as to what hurt he might have received led to 
an extremely interesting discussion of the "ways of a wave 
with a man"; also of the comparative seaworthiness of 
light cruisers and destroyers. The things that waves have 
done to all three of them since the war began (to say nothing 
of the things all three have done in spite of waves) is a story 
of its own. 
The barometer continued to fall all day, with the wind 
rising a mile of velocity for every point of drop. The seas, 
though higher and heavier, were also more regular and less 
inclined to catch the ship' with her weather-rail down. The 
low cloud-bank of mid-forenoon had by early dusk grown to 
a heavens-obscuring mask of ominous import, and by dark, 
snow was beginning to fall. The ship was reeling through 
the blackness of the pit when I clambered to the deck after 
dinner, so that the driving spray and ice-needles struck the 
face before one saw them by even the thousandth of a second. 
The darkness was such as one almost never encounters ashore, 
and it was some time before I accustomed myself to close 
my eyes against the unseen missiles (when turning to wind- 
\yard) without deliberately telling myself to do so in advance. 
Into the Stygian pall the vivid" golden triangles of the 
signal apparatus on the bridge flashed like the stab of a 
flaming sword. One instant the darkness was almost pal- 
pable enough to lean against ; the next, the silhouette of 
funnels and foretop pricked into life, but only to be quenched 
again before the eye had time to fix a single detail. So lirief 
was any one flash that the action in each transient vision 
was suspended as in an instantaneous photograph, yet the 
effect of the quick succession of flashes was of con'tinuous 
motion, as like the kincma. From where I stood, the heart 
of the fluttering golden halos, where a destroyer winked 
back its answer, were repeatedly obliterated by the inky 
loom of a wave, but the reflection was always thrown high 
enough into the mist to carry the message. 
Returning to the ward-room by the way of the mess- 
decks, I saw the youth who had offered "me the anti- 
seasick lozenges in the morning. Now quite recovered, he 
was himself playing the pork-on-a-string game with one 
ot the only two "prostrates" still in sight. The following 
morning— though the weather, if anything, was worse than 
ever— all evidences of "indisposition" had disappeared 
I'or some days more we prowled the wet seaways and 
then well along into a night that was foggier, colder and 
windier than the one into which we had steamed out we 
crept along a heightening headland, nosed in the wake of 
the flagship through a line of booms and opened a bay that 
was dappled with the lights of many ships. A few minutes 
ater, and the raucous grind of a chain running out through a 
hawse-pipe signalled that we were back at the old «tand 
And since, like all the rest of our sisters of the Grand 
Meet, we were expected to be ready to put to sea on x hours' 
notice there was nothing for it but that the several hundred 
tons of coal which the mighty "Zeus" had been snorting out 
in the form of smoke to contaminate the ozone of a very 
sizeable area of the North Sea should be replenished without 
delay A collier edged gingerly out of a whirling snow- 
squall and moored fast alongside as I groped forward to 
retake jjosscsskju of my cabin under the bridge and I went 
to sleep that night to the grind of the winches and the steady 
tramjj-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the decks below 
