Mark how virtue is rewarded!  Another of our destroyers an hour or so previously had been knocked clean out of action, before she had done anything, by a big shell which gutted a boiler-room and started an oil fire. (That is the drawback to oil.) She crawled out between the battleships till she “reached an area of comparative calm” and repaired damage.  She says:  “The fire having been dealt with it was found a mat kept the stokehold dry.  My only trouble now being lack of speed, I looked round for useful employment, and saw a destroyer in great difficulties, so closed her.”  That destroyer was our paralytic friend of the intermittent torpedo-tubes, and a grateful ship she was when her crippled sister (but still good for a few knots) offered her a tow, “under very trying conditions with large enemy ships approaching.”  So the two set off together, Cripple and Paralytic, with heavy shells falling round them, as sociable as a couple of lame hounds.  Cripple worked up to 12 knots, and the weather grew vile, and the tow parted.  Paralytic, by this time, had raised steam in a boiler or two, and made shift to get along slowly on her own, Cripple hirpling beside her, till Paralytic could not make any more headway in that rising sea, and Cripple had to tow her once more.  Once more the tow parted.  So they tied Paralytic up rudely and effectively with a cable round her after bollards and gun (presumably because of strained forward bulkheads) and hauled her stern-first, through heavy seas, at continually reduced speeds, doubtful of their position, unable to sound because of the seas, and much pestered by a wind which backed without warning, till, at last, they made land, and turned into the hospital appointed for brave wounded ships.  Everybody speaks well of Cripple.  Her name crops up in several reports, with such compliments as the men of the sea use when they see good work.  She herself speaks well of her Lieutenant, who, as executive officer, “took charge of the fire and towing arrangements in a very creditable manner,” and also of Tom Battye and Thomas Kerr, engine-room artificer and stoker petty officer, who “were in the stokehold at the time of the shell striking, and performed cool and prompt decisive action, although both suffering from shock and slight injuries.”

USEFUL EMPLOYMENT

Have you ever noticed that men who do Homeric deeds often describe them in Homeric language?  The sentence “I looked round for useful employment” is worthy of Ulysses when “there was an evil sound at the ships of men who perished and of the ships themselves broken at the same time.”