TROUBLE WITH A GUN

E2 was a wet, strained, and uncomfortable boat for the rest of her cruise.  She sank steamers, burned dhows; was worried by torpedo-boats and hunted by Hun planes; hit bottom freely and frequently; silenced forts that fired at her from lonely beaches; warned villages who might have joined in the game that they had better keep to farming; shelled railway lines and stations; would have shelled a pier, but found there was a hospital built at one end of it, “so could not bombard”; came upon dhows crowded with “female refugees” which she “allowed to proceed,” and was presented with fowls in return; but through it all her chief preoccupation was that racked and strained gun and mounting.  When there was nothing else doing she reports sourly that she “worked on gun.”  As a philosopher of the lower deck put it:  “’Tisn’t what you blanky do that matters, it’s what you blanky have to do.”  In other words, worry, not work, kills.

E2’s gun did its best to knock the heart out of them all.  She had to shift the wretched thing twice; once because the bolts that held it down were smashed (the wire hawser must have pretty well pulled it off its seat), and again because the hull beneath it leaked on pressure.  She went down to make sure of it.  But she drilled and tapped and adjusted, till in a short time the gun worked again and killed steamers as it should.  Meanwhile, the whole boat leaked.  All the plates under the old gun-position forward leaked; she leaked aft through damaged hydroplane guards, and on her way home they had to keep the water down by hand pumps while she was diving through the nets.  Where she did not leak outside she leaked internally, tank leaking into tank, so that the petrol got into the main fresh-water supply and the men had to be put on allowance.  The last pint was served out when she was in the narrowest part of the Narrows, a place where one’s mouth may well go dry of a sudden.

Here for the moment the records end.  I have been at some pains not to pick and choose among them.  So far from doctoring or heightening any of the incidents, I have rather understated them; but I hope I have made it clear that through all the haste and fury of these multiplied actions, when life and death and destruction turned on the twitch of a finger, not one life of any non-combatant was wittingly taken.  They were carefully picked up or picked out, taken below, transferred to boats, and despatched or personally conducted in the intervals of business to the safe, unexploding beach.  Sometimes they part from their chaperones “with many expressions of good will,” at others they seem greatly relieved and rather surprised at not being knocked on the head after the custom of their Allies.  But the boats with a hundred things on their minds no more take credit for their humanity than their commanders explain the feats for which they won their respective decorations.