They must have been washed over the side!"
He was right.
The entire contents of a rack had broken adrift, lifted from their cradles by some freak wave, and tumbled over the side.
Through some oversight, they had been left set at their shallow setting, those put on for the midget submarine in Scapa, and had gone off almost directly under the ship.
The damage, it seemed, was only minor.
Up in 'A' mess deck, right for'ard, conditions were even worse.
There was more wreckage on the decks and far more seasickness-not the green-faced, slightly ludicrous malaise of the cross-channel steamer, but tearing rendering conversions, dark and heavy with blood-for the bows had been rearing and plunging, rearing and plunging, thirty, forty, fifty feet at a time for endless, hopeless hours; but there was an even more sinister agent at work, rapidly making the mess-deck untenable.
At the for'ard end of the capstan flat, which adjoined the mess-deck, was the battery-room.
In here were stored, or on charge a hundred and one different batteries, ranging from the heavy lead-acid batteries weighing over a hundred pounds to the tiny nickel-calmium cells for the emergency lighting.
Here, too, were stored earthenware jars of prepared acid and big, glass carboys of undiluted sulphuric.
These last were permanently stored: in heavy weather, the big batteries were lashed down.
No one knew what had happened.
It seemed likely-certain, indeed-that acid spilt from the batteries by the tremendous pitching had eaten through the lashings.
Then a battery must have broken loose and smashed another, and another, and another, and then the jars and carboys until the entire floor-fortunately of acid-resisting material-was awash to a depth of five or six inches in sulphuric acid.
A young torpedoman, on a routine check, had opened the door and seen the splashing sea of acid inside.
Panicking, and recalling vaguely that caustic soda, stored in quantities just outside, was a neutraliser for sulphuric, he had emptied a forty-pound carton of it into the battery-room: he was in the Sick Bay now, blinded.
The acid fumes saturated the capstan flat, making entry impossible without breathing equipment, and was seeping back, slowly, insidiously, into the mess-deck: more deadly still hundreds of gallons of salt water from sprung deck-plates and broken capstan speaking tubes were surging crazily around the flat: already the air was tainted with the first traces of chlorine gas.
On the deck immediately above, Hartley and two seamen, belayed with ropes, had made a brief, hopelessly gallant attempt to plug the gaping holes: all three, battered into near senselessness by the great waves pounding the fo'c'sle, were dragged off within a minute.
For the men below, it was discomfort, danger and desperate physical illness: for the bare handful of men above, the officers and ratings on the bridge, it was pure undiluted hell.
But a hell not of our latter-day imagining, a strictly Eastern and Biblical conception, but the hell of our ancient North-European ancestors, of the Vikings, the Danes, the Jutes, of Beowulf and the monster-haunted meres-the hell of eternal cold.
True, the temperature registered a mere 10
Men have been known to live, even to work in the open, at far lower temperatures.
What is not so well known, what is barely realised at all, is that when freezing point has been passed, every extra mile per hour of wind is equivalent, in terms of pure cold as it reacts on a human being, to a 1
Five minutes at a time was enough for any man on the bridge, then he had to retire to the Captain's shelter.
Not that manning the bridge was more than a gesture anyway, it was impossible to look into that terrible wind: the cold would have seared the eyeballs blind, the ice would have gouged them out. And it was impossible even to see through the Kent Clear-view windscreens.
They still spun at high speed, but uselessly: the ice-laden storm, a gigantic sand-blaster, had starred and abraded the plate glass until it was completely opaque.
It was not a dark night.
It was possible to see above, abeam and astern.
Above, patches of night-blue sky and handfuls of stars could be seen at fleeting intervals, obscured as soon as seen by the scudding, shredded cloud-wrack.
Abeam and astern, the sea was an inky black, laced with boiling white.
Gone now were the serried ranks of yesterday, gone, too, the decorative white-caps: here now were only massive mountains of water, broken and confused, breaking this way and that, but always tending south.
Some of these moving ranges of water-by no stretch of the imagination, only by proxy, could they be called waves-were small, insignificant-in size of a suburban house: others held a million tons of water, towered seventy to eighty feet, looming terrifyingly against the horizon, big enough to drown a cathedral... As the Kapok Kid remarked, the best thing to do with these waves was to look the other way.
More often than not, they passed harmlessly by, plunging the Ulysses into the depths: rarely, they curled over and broke their tops into the bridge, soaking the unfortunate Officer of the Watch.
He had then to be removed at once or he would literally have frozen solid within a minute.
So far they had survived, far beyond the expectation of any man.
But, as they were blind ahead, there was always the worry of what would come next.
Would the next sea be normal-for that storm, that was-or some nameless juggernaut that would push them under for ever?
The suspense never lifted, a suspense doubled by the fact that when the Ulysses reared and crashed down, it did so soundlessly, sightlessly.
They could judge its intensity only by movement and vibration: the sound of the sea, everything, was drowned in the Satanic cacophony of that howling wind in the upper works and rigging.
About two in the morning-it was just after the depth-charge explosions-some of the senior officers had staged their own private mutiny.
The Captain, who had been persuaded to go below less than an hour previously, exhausted and shaking uncontrollably with cold, had been wakened by the depth-charging and had returned to the bridge.
He found his way barred by the Commander and Commander Westcliffe, who bundled him quietly but firmly into the shelter.
Turner heaved the door to, switched on the light.
Vallery was more puzzled than angry.
"What, what in the world does this mean?" he demanded.
"Mutiny!" boomed Turner happily.
His face was covered in blood from flying splinters of ice. "On the High Seas, is the technical term, I believe.
Isn't that so, Admiral?"
"Exactly," the Admiral agreed.
Vallery swung round, startled: Tyndall was lying in state on the bunk.