No Banners, No Bugles

by Edward Ellsberg

  I didn’t stay to say hello. They seemed to be doing all right, since, though they all blinked momentarily at me, they were all too busy even to open their tightly clenched jaws. Besides, I was sufficiently cooked myself for the moment. That was the fourth (and last) burning corridor I had just dragged myself through to check progress, and I needed to cool off. I turned, and keeping my stinging eyes closed as much as I dared without falling flat on my face on the scorching deck, and breathing as little as I could of the mingled smoke and superheated steam that formed all there was for atmosphere in that passageway, I stumbled back along the fire hoses for a guide to the well deck aft.

  Out in the open again where at least the air was mostly air though it was still infernally hot, I leaned against the athwartship superstructure bulkhead. Half-blinded, I gasped like a fish out of water, sucking vast quantities of oxygen into my scorched lungs. Then I went in search of Harding. He was on the boat deck.

  On the boat deck, things had been different, though it was hard to say whether they’d been any better. Up on the boat deck, it wasn’t so hot—there the men were merely getting seared by radiation from the flames forward and overhead instead of being roasted from hot steel all around as in the ovens down below. And there was certainly more air. But to offset these advantages, they were all the while exposed to the shrapnel from bursting 20-mm. shells. That eerie performance of those damned unmanned sky-guns was still automatically going on and there was nothing we could do to ring down the curtain and stop it—at least for all the guns beyond easy range of our hoses—those we couldn’t reach with a stream of water to cool down occasionally.

  Fortunately for us, while everybody’s tin hat had caught plenty coming down from overhead and several men had already been hard hit by hot shrapnel coming in at flatter angles, none of the wounds had been serious enough yet to knock any of the men on the boat deck more than temporarily out of action. That, I supposed, was due to the fact that all the shell bursts were low order explosions from overheated TNT, not high order detonations from the impact fuses. Consequently the velocities of the flying fragments were much less than normal. At any rate, that strafing from the unmanned guns forward of us hadn’t yet driven us off the boat deck, and apparently wasn’t going to, much as it kept all hands on the topside ducking involuntarily each time the guns commenced firing again.

  Nevertheless Harding was greatly worried, and as soon as I hove in sight up the ladder, he let me have it. He was afraid of a major explosion right aft which would send us all sky high any moment, as well as sinking the King Salvor close alongside.

  Conditions had changed since we had first boarded the Strathallan. The armed trawler Restive had picked up both towlines and aided by the other trawler, the Active, pushing directly on the Strathallan’s stem, had slowly swung her around roughly 180° through the wind. Now with the turn finally completed, both trawlers were towing her directly for Oran sixty miles away, speed between three and four knots, all they could make with such a heavy drag astern.

  So now we had the wind on the starboard side of the Strathallan, not on her port side as in the beginning, and as an unwelcome result the King Salvor was to leeward of her. For unfortunately, due to the course we had to steer to make port, the wind was no longer directly abeam as when the vessel had been drifting free, broadside to it. Now it was to a fair degree from ahead, on her starboard bow.

  That had immediately made matters on the topside worse for everybody, but there was no help for it. For now the flames and smoke from forward were being swept diagonally aft on the boat deck right over our heads and over the King Salvor secured to the new lee quarter. While we had successfully driven the fire forward somewhat on the boat deck, as well as below, still the flames from amidships were sweeping right over us, carrying sizable burning embers with them in a fierce updraft, and dropping some of the heavier of them not only on the boat deck astern of us not yet afire but also on the King Salvor.

  About the King Salvor, Harding wasn’t concerned. His signalman and a couple of seamen left there to tend lines, were frenziedly working with buckets of sea water, scurrying around to souse every burning brand as it came down on her topsides. He was confident they could keep the King Salvor from becoming another Strathallan on a tiny scale. It was the Strathallan herself that had him worried.

  “Look at that, Captain!” he burst out the moment I showed up on the boat deck. He pointed dead aft.

  I looked. Harding was pointing at the deserted 6-inch gun on a wide circular platform right on the Strathallan’s stern. The gun platform, like everything else about, was littered with shrapnel and glowing embers. But that gun platform was all steel; I didn’t see how it could catch fire, and of course the gun couldn’t.

  “What about it?” I asked, very puzzled, for it wasn’t like the unemotional Harding to get wrought up over anything.

  “The deckhouse that gun’s standing on is the main magazine aft! I’ve sighted it all around to be sure!” he shouted to make himself heard above the uproar of the fire and of the exploding A.A. guns. “It’s jammed full o’ 6-inch powder charges, as well as shells for that gun! There’s five tons o’ smokeless powder at least in that magazine, let alone the TNT filling all the shells for that hundred-pounder there! And it’s blasted hot in that magazine already, with the paint on the outside starting to blister. If it gets any hotter there from this damned backdraft and all the hot stuff raining down on it, that magazine’ll go up and we’ll all go with it! We’d better turn all hands to heaving that ammo overboard, four bells, before she blows on us!”

  I took another look, then shook my head. Probably the usually stolid Harding was right enough in his unusual perturbation over the new danger. With the wind as it now was, it was only a question of time till those cordite charges got hot enough to explode the magazine. And probably also there were the five tons of powder that he feared in that magazine, and some fifteen tons of 6-inch shells beside, twenty tons all told of mingled high explosives that would take all our men to handle. Even with all of them working on it, it could well take us more than half an hour to jettison over the stern the contents of that magazine.

  But I couldn’t see it. If we did that, we might as well quit. For if we dragged the men off their hoses for half an hour to jettison powder and shell, we’d lose everything we’d already gained on the fire, maybe more, and have to make a completely fresh start on it outside the reignited superstructure when we’d finished manhandling overboard that twenty tons of cordite and steel. However, aside from the added fatigue by then, I doubted if any man could bring himself to go through that battle at the corridor entrances a second time to break in against the flames and then have to fight his way forward again over ground he’d once cooked himself to gain and then had thrown away—not now when he knew what it meant. Willing as they all were, I was sure they’d all wilt at that prospect. I couldn’t ask them to do it.

  Still, something had to be done about the magazine, and that soon, or unquestionably that twenty tons of ammunition would blow up exactly as Harding feared. Of course, when that happened we could quit worrying about the fire and could write off the Strathallan, except that we wouldn’t any of us be around to be doing either any worrying or any writing off.

  There was, however, another way out, though it had drawbacks. We could take a couple of the hose lines working forward of us on the boat deck, turn them aft, and keep them playing on the magazine decks and bulkheads to hold its temperature within safe bounds. However, if I did that, we’d not only quit making progress on the boat deck but it was dubious that we’d be able to hold what we’d already gained there. Still, it seemed the only alternative, and something had to be done immediately.

  I told Harding I would not quit fighting the fire to jettison the ammunition; we would avoid explosion by playing hoses on the magazine instead. He could take one hose line from forward for a start; if that didn’t cool things down enough to suit him, he could take two. But no more.

  The idea appea
led to Harding and after pondering it a moment he acquiesced. But when he turned forward to consider which of his four hose lines he could best spare to turn about for the job, the sight of that awesome fire front amidships sweeping up to enshroud the smokestacks and then curving in a vast ruddy arc aft over our heads, made him decide he couldn’t spare any. He promptly thought up a better idea.

  Just abaft the King Salvor’s bridge was a latticed steel tower surmounted by a fire monitor, a large fire nozzle mounted with training and elevating gears so it could be swung about like an A.A. gun. We weren’t using it, because it didn’t have range enough from where the low King Salvor was tied up well astern effectively to reach the fire far up on the boat deck and forward on the super-structure. But it should be able to cover the Strathallan’s stern like a fountain, and it had the further advantage that when once set in train and elevation, it required no attendance thereafter. It was just the thing to give that magazine on the stern a generous shower bath, and to keep on doing it! Harding started on the run down the ladders from the boat deck to board his ship again and swing that fire monitor into action.

  In a few minutes it was going, shooting a thick stream of water almost vertically into the air, aimed to come down in a heavy spray all over the Strathallan’s near by stern, drenching the 6-inch gun and its platform, and streaming down the four sides of the magazine to cool it beautifully. I gave up worrying further about the magazine; so did Harding, who shortly rejoined me up on the boat deck where I, as well as the magazine, was cooling off in that heaven-sent shower.

  That fixed everything. We no longer had any worries. We were gaining steadily on the fire, we had washed out the danger of a magazine explosion in our rear, we were sure to win and get the Strathallan into port.

  I had the measure of that fire now. Ultimately we could extinguish it in the superstructure, keep it from getting a foothold either in the stern or in the bow, and hold it to the blazing fire-rooms deep in the bowels of the ship below. The fire there we could not hope to extinguish at sea—it was fed by fuel oil streaming into the firerooms from strained oil bunkers all about them, and against burning oil, water was worse than useless. That flaming oil could be put out only by smothering those firerooms in thick blankets of firefoam spread all over the blazing liquid surfaces. We had no foam equipment on the King Salvor for such a task, nor the tons and tons of foam powder it would take for the job. But at least after we had knocked out the fire in the superstructure, we could contain that burning fuel oil to the firerooms by continuous work with our hoses till we got in and keep it from reigniting the rest of the ship. Once in port, with all the foam equipment there, we could then smother the conflagration in the fire-rooms and our task would be over.

  There was nothing further for us to worry ourselves about—save the stark fact that it would take eighteen hours more at least of battling the flames before we got into port and it was a certainty that before two hours more of those eighteen were out, we wouldn’t have a single seaman left on his feet able to hold a nozzle, if any one of them lasted even that long. We had everything we needed to save that huge troopship—except men enough. Without at least an equal number to our little force to spell all our men at the hoses, two hours on, two hours off, we must lose. However willing, however dogged, there were limits to what human flesh could stand for long. We had to have more men at once or the Strathallan was lost.

  There was only one possible place we could get any—the Laforey. For the first time in the hour since we had boarded the Strathallan, I looked about again over the sea for her. What struck me first was how dark it was getting; that short December day was fading and night was coming on rapidly, though before with the splendid artificial illumination we were receiving on our job, I hadn’t observed it. It wouldn’t be long now till the blacked-out Laforey would be invisible somewhere off in the darkness, though neither she nor any solicitous U-boat hanging about would have the slightest difficulty in seeing us all through the night.

  There was the Laforey in the dusk, at the moment about a mile away, zigzagging to the northward of us off our stern, clear of the smoke.

  “Come on, Harding,” I suggested. “Let’s signal the Laforey and ask her to send forty men to alternate with us. She ought to have two hundred at least aboard; certainly she can spare us forty to help save this ship.”

  Together we started down the ladder from the boat deck, a little regretful at having to get out from under our cooling shower. On the next deck down, I spotted Sid Everett, taking his brief spell standing watch outside at the starboard corridor entrance. Sid looked ghastly from his last turn inside with the fire.

  “How’d you make out with that Hindoo, Sid?” I asked in passing. “Did you bring him to?”

  “I did, Cap’n, right enough,” mumbled the exhausted third mate, “an’ lively too! I soaked ’is nose in ammonia, shoved a shot o’ Scotch between ’is teeth, an’ ’e gasped an’ opened his eyes, four bells an’ a jingle. I ’ad to leave ’im then. But I’m bloomin’ sorry I wasted the Scotch on ’im, Cap’n; I could bloody well use it on m’self right now. I might ’a done the job on that Hindoo just with the ammonia!”

  I nodded commiseratingly at Sid, continued down the ladders to the main deck below. Well, at least we had revived our rescued Lascar; that was something.

  Harding, who had descended first, was waiting for me at the foot of the ladder. I started for the King Salvor’s upper platform heaving alongside us to port, which was about all I could see of our little ship above the Strathallan’s main deck rail even when she lifted to a wave crest. But Harding stopped me.

  “Cast your eye on that, Captain,” he said bitterly, pointing inboard toward the Strathallan’s swimming pool.

  I had hastily noted in passing the existence of that swimming pool full of water my first few seconds aboard, but since then in all the hubbub I had paid no further attention to it. Now I looked at it again, more closely.

  “That,” to which Captain Harding was pointing, was a beautiful new gasoline motor-driven portable fire pump on rubber-tired wheels, standing close to the far side of the swimming pool. Its heavy suction hose was coupled up, all ready to drop into the water of the pool, and a few lengths of fire hose lay on deck, limp, of course, but also coupled to one of the discharges of the pump. So after all, Harding had had a portable fire pump on the King Salvor. And now he had it aboard the Strathallan, ready to go, though without anybody to man the extra hoses it could supply.

  “Looks good to me, skipper,” I said approvingly, wondering why all the sarcasm in Harding’s voice. “We can use that too when we get some more men from the Laforey. But I thought you told me you didn’t have any?”

  “That’s right, and that’s the meat of it, blast it all!” cursed Harding. “That fire pump belongs to the Strathallan, not to me, and it’s been a’standing there by that swimming pool ready to go all the while. Y’ might ’a thought the crew o’ the Strathallan’d abandoned her ‘cause their engine room was flooded and maybe they had no pumps at all anywhere else to hold down that fire below, mightn’t y’ now? But there’s that portable—all set to go alongside that swimming pool and never even run before! There’d never been a drop o’ water through that pump. When first I sighted it that way I thought o’ course she must be broken down and wouldn’t pump so I didn’t bother with it. But later when we were all set, I got curious and I took a minute off to see. So Teddy Brown and I turned to on it and she started when we cranked ’er up with no trouble at all and ran four bells. Just to make sure of ’er for an anchor to windward, we even dropped the suction hose into that big pool for a minute and she grabbed a suction right off and pumped fine. But seeing as I hadn’t anybody to man any more hoses, I shut ’er down again so’s not to waste the water in that pool; which may come in handy yet!” Harding paused a moment for breath in his efforts to make himself heard, then finished caustically,

  “An’ to think they abandoned a fine ship like this, without even trying to use what they ha
d in their hands to fight the fire! An’ when they shoved themselves off on those destroyers, the fire on the topside anyway couldn’t ’a been much. There’s lots else besides I’ve sighted since I came aboard that shows what kind o’ sailors they must ’a been!”

  So embittered that if he hadn’t already been scorched a fiery red he would have been blue in the face, Captain Harding turned away from that idle fire pump to board his own tiny ship. I followed him silently. He had covered the situation—nothing could be added to his scornful castigation of that panic-stricken crew.

  Watching till the heaving signal platform of our ship synchronized with the wide teak railing of the Strathallan, we leaped across. Harding sang out to his signalman to belay for a moment chasing about after embers with his bucket, to get his signal lantern again, and to accompany us aft to the fantail where we could see the Laforey. Shortly we were all there, and our signal lantern was flashing through the dusk to the distant destroyer astern, asking her to send us forty seamen to alternate with ours in fighting the fire. There was an immediate acknowledging flash, then a short interval, and the answer came blinking back,