FIRST BLOOD

When they got to the end of the Railway Pier where the pinnace was lying panting and puffing, a Flag-Lieutenant touched his cap to Erskine, took him by the arm and led him aside. He took an envelope out of his pocket and said, in a low tone:

“Here are your instructions, Erskine. They’ve jumped on us a bit more quickly than we thought they would, but the Commander-in-Chief trusts to you and your ship to do the needful. The position is this: one division of the Russian, German and Dutch fleets is making a combined attack on Hull and Newcastle. Two other divisions are going for the mouth of the Thames, and the North Sea Squadron is going to look after them. The French North Sea Squadron is making a rush on Dover, and will get very considerably pounded in the process. Two French fleets from Cherbourg and Brest are coming up Channel, and each of them has a screen of torpedo boats and destroyers. The Southern Fleet Reserve is concentrated here and at Portland. The Channel Fleet is outside, and we hope to get it in their rear, so that we’ll have them between the ships and the forts. If we do, they’ll have just about as hot a time of it as anybody wants.

“As far as we’ve been able to learn, the French are going to try Togo’s tactics at Port Arthur, and rush Portsmouth with the small craft. You’ll find that it’s your business to look after them. Sink, smash and generally destroy. Go for everything you see. There isn’t a craft of ours within twenty miles outside. Good-bye, and good luck to you!”

“Good-bye!” said Erskine, as they shook hands, “and if we don’t come back, give my love to the Lords of the Admiralty and thank them for giving me the chance with the Ithuriel. Bye-bye!”

Their hands gripped again and the captain of the Ithuriel ran down the steps like a boy going to a picnic.

The pinnace gave a little squeak from its siren and sped away down the harbour between the two forts, in which the gunners were standing by the new fourteen-inch wire-wound guns, whose long chases were prevented from drooping after continuous discharge by an ingenious application of the principle of the cantilever bridge, invented by the creator of the Ithuriel. In the breech-chamber of each of them was a thousand-pound shell, carrying a bursting charge of five hundred pounds of an explosive which was an improvement on blasting gelatine, and the guns were capable of throwing these to a distance of twelve miles with precision. They were the most formidable weapons either ashore or afloat.

Just outside the harbour the pinnace swung round to the westward and in a few minutes stopped alongside the Ithuriel.

As far as Lennard could see she was neither cruiser nor destroyer nor submarine, but a sort of compound of all three. She did not appear to be a steamer because she had no funnels. She was not exactly a submarine because she had a signal-mast forward and carried five long, ugly-looking guns, three ahead and two astern, of a type that he had never seen before. Forward of the mast there was a conning-tower of oval shape, with the lesser curves fore and aft. The breech-ends of the guns were covered by a long hood of steel, apparently of great thickness, and that 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 this invention of yours at once. I’ve got a pretty well-fitted laboratory down below and we might have a try. But you must excuse me a moment, I will just run through this.”

He opened the envelope containing his instructions, put them down on the little desk in front of him and then read a note that was enclosed with them.

“By Jove,” he said, “they’re pretty quick up at headquarters. You’ll have 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 for the present.”

In front of the desk and above the little steering-wheel there was a mahogany board studded with two sets of ivory buttons, disposed in two lines of six each. He touched one of these, and Lennard saw him disappear through the floor of the conning-tower. Within a few moments the 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 in engineering.”

While Captain Erskine is communicating his instructions to his second in command, and arranging the details of the coming fight, there will be time to give a brief description of the craft on board of which Lennard so unexpectedly found himself, and which an invention of his own was destined to make even more formidable than it was.

To put it as briefly as possible, the Ithuriel was a combination of destroyer, cruiser, submarine and ram, and she had cost Erskine three years of hard work to think out. She was three hundred feet long, fifty feet broad, and thirty feet from her upper keel to her deck. This was of course an abnormal depth for a vessel of her length, but then the Ithuriel was quite an abnormal warship. One-third of her depth consisted of a sinking-chamber, protected by twelve-inch armour, and this chamber could be filled in a few minutes with four thousand tons of water. This is of course the same thing as saying she had two waterlines. The normal cruising line gave her a freeboard of ten feet. Above the sinking-tanks her vitals were protected by ten-inch armour. In short, as regards armour, she was an entire reversal of the ordinary type of warship, and she had the advantage of being impervious to torpedo attack. Loaded torpedoes had been fired at her and had burst like eggs against a wall, with no more effect than to make her heel over a few degrees to the other side. Submarines had attacked her and got their noses badly bruised in the process. It was, indeed, admitted by the experts of the Admiralty that under water she was impregnable.

Her propelling power consisted of four sets of engines, all well below the waterline. Three of these drove three propellers astern: the fourth drove a suction screw which revolved just underneath the ram. This was a mass of steel weighing fifty tons and curved upwards like the inverted beak of an eagle. Erskine had taken this idea from the Russian ice-breakers which had been designed by the Russian Admiral Makaroff and built at Elswick. The screw was protected by a steel grating of which the forward protecting girder completed the curve of the stem. Aft, there was a similar ram, weighing thirty tons and a like protection to the after-screws.

The driving power was derived from a combination of petrol and pulverised smokeless coal, treated with liquid oxygen, which made combustion practically perfect. There was no boilers or furnaces, only combustion chambers, and this fact made the carrying of the great weight of armour under the waterline possible. The speed of the Ithuriel was forty-five knots ahead when all four screws were driving and pulling, and thirty knots astern when they were reversed. Her total capacity was five thousand two hundred tons.

Behind the three forward guns was a dome-shaped conning-tower of nine-inch steel, hardened like the rest of the armour by an improvement on the Harvey process. Above the conning-tower were two searchlight projectors, both capable of throwing a clear ray to a distance of four miles 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 much shorter time than was necessary to make this needful description of what was probably the most formidable craft in the British Navy. “We’re off now. I’ve fitted up half a dozen shells with that diabolical invention of yours. If we run across a battleship or a cruiser, we’ll try them. I think our friends the enemy will find them somewhat of a paralyser, and there’s nothing like beginning pretty strong.”

“Nothing like hitting them hard at first, and I hope that those things of mine will be what I think they are, and unless all my theories are quite wrong, I fancy you’ll find them all right.”

“They would be the first theories of yours that have gone wrong, Mr Lennard,” replied Erskine, “but anyhow, we shall soon see. I have put three 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 after guns loaded with my own shell, so if we come across anything big, we shall be able to try them against each other. At present, my instructions are to deal with the lighter craft only: destroyers and that sort of thing, you know.”

“But don’t you fire on them?” said Lennard. “What would happen if they got a torpedo under you?”

“Well,” said Erskine, “as a matter of fact I don’t think destroyers are worth shooting at. Our guns are meant for bigger game. But it’s no good trying to explain things now. You’ll see, pretty soon, and you’ll learn more 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 ten knots between the two old North and South Spithead forts on the top of each of which one of the new fourteen-inch thousand-pounders had been mounted on disappearing carriages.

“Now,” he continued, “if we’re going to find them anywhere, we shall find them here, or hereabouts. My orders are to smash everything that I can get at.”

“Fairly comprehensive,” said Lennard.

“Yes, Lennard, and it’s an order that I’m going to fill. We may as well quicken up a bit now. You understand, Castellan is looking after the guns, and his sub., Mackenzie is communicating orders to my Chief Engineer, 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 of the board as he spoke.

The next moment Lennard felt the rubber-covered floor of the conning-tower jump under his feet. All the coast lights were extinguished but there was a half-moon and he saw the outlines of the shore slip away faster behind them. The eastern heights of the Isle of Wight 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-wheel a very gentle movement and swung the Ithuriel’s head round to the eastward. “If these chaps are going to make a rush in the way Togo did at Port Arthur, they’ve got to do it between Selsey Bill and Nettlestone Point. If they’re mad enough to try the other way between Round Tower Point and Hurst Castle, they’ll get blown out of the water in very small pieces, so we needn’t worry about them there. Our business is to keep them out of this side. Ah, look now, there are two or three of them there. See, ahead of the port bow. We’ll tackle these gentlemen first.”

Lennard looked out through the narrow semicircular window of six-inch crystal glass running across the front of the conning-tower, which was almost as strong as steel, and saw three little dark, moving spots on the half-moonlit water, about two miles ahead, stealing up in line abreast.

“Those chaps are trying to get in between the Spithead forts,” said Erskine. “They’re slowed down to almost nothing, waiting for the clouds to 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 touched another button. The Ithuriel leapt forward again and swung about three points to the eastward. In three minutes she was off Black Point, and this movement brought her into a straight line with the three destroyers. He gave the steering-wheel another half turn and her head swung round in a short quarter circle. He put his finger on to the bottom button on the right-hand side of the signal board and said to Lennard:

“Hold tight now, she’s going.”

Lennard held tight, for he felt the floor jump harder under him this time.

In the dim light he saw the nearest of the destroyers, as it seemed to him, rush towards them sideways. Erskine touched another button. A shudder ran through the fabric of the Ithuriel and her bow rose above five feet from the water. A couple of minutes later it hit the destroyer amidships, rolled her over, broke her in two like a log of wood, amidst a roar of crackling guns and a scream of escaping steam, went over her and headed for the next one.

Lennard clenched his teeth and said nothing. He was thinking too hard to say anything just then.

The second destroyer opened fire with her twelve-and six-pounders and dropped a couple of torpedoes as the Ithuriel rushed at her. The Ithuriel was now travelling at forty knots an hour. The torpedoes at thirty. The combined speed was therefore nearly a hundred statute miles an hour. Erskine saw the two white shapes drop into the water, their courses converging towards him. A half turn of the wheel to port swung the 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 its course, hit the other one and both exploded. A mountain of foam-crowned water rose up and the commander of the French destroyer congratulated himself on the annihilation of at least one of the English warships, but the next moment the grey-blue, almost invisible shape of the Ithuriel leapt up out of the semi-darkness, and her long pointed ram struck amidships, cut him down to the waterline, and almost before the two halves of his vessel had sunk the same fate had befallen the third destroyer.

“Well, what do you think of that?” said Erskine, as he touched a couple more buttons and the Ithuriel swung round to the eastward again.

“Well,” said Lennard, slowly, “of course it’s war, and those fellows were coming in to do all the damage they could. But it is just a bit terrible, for all that. It’s just seven minutes since you rammed the first boat: you haven’t fired a shot and there are three big destroyers and 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 awful and entirely horrible, and naval war is of course the most horrible of all. There is no chance for the defeated: my orders do not even allow me to pick up a man from one of those vessels. On the other hand, one must remember that if one of those destroyers had got in, they could have let go 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 have been at the bottom of the Solent by this time, and those torpedoes wouldn’t have had any sentiment in them. Hallo, there’s another!”

A long, black shape surmounted by a signal-mast and four funnels slid up and 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 buttons again. The Ithuriel swung round and ran down on her prey. The two fifteen-and the six twelve-pounder guns ahead and astern and on the broadside of the destroyer crackled out and a hail of shells came whistling across the water. A few of them struck the Ithuriel, glanced off 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 bigger game. We haven’t an angle that a shell would hit. You might just as well fire boiled peas at a hippopotamus as those little things at us. Of course a big shell square amidships would hurt us, but then she’s so handy that I think I could stop it hitting her straight.”

While he was speaking the Ithuriel got up to full speed again. Lennard shut his eyes. He felt a slight shock, and then a dull grinding. A crash of guns and a roar of escaping steam, and when he looked out again, the destroyer had disappeared. The next moment a blinding glare of light streamed across the water from the direction of Selsey.

“A big cruiser, or battleship,” said Erskine. “French or German. Now we’ll see what those shells of yours are made of.”