Surfaced at 10 p.m.; a very heavy sea running and impossible to do much more than heave to. This weather has one point in its favour and that is that the destroyers are driven in.
It got steadily worse all night, and at midnight we lost our foremost wireless mast overboard; we have now (10 a.m.) been 48 hours without communication. At dawn we could see nothing to fix by; not a buoy in sight, nothing but an expanse of foam–topped short steep waves of dirty neutral–tinted water; how different to the great green and white surges of the broad Atlantic.
Under these circumstances Alten decided to risk it and return without laying our mines; for once in a way I agreed with him, as it is better not to lay a minefield at all than dump one down in some unknown position which one may have to traverse oneself in the course of a month or so. We are now slowly, very slowly, struggling back to Zeebrugge.
A green sea came down the conning tower to–day, and everything in the boat is damp and smelly and beastly. The propellers race at frequent intervals and the whole boat shudders—I feel miserable.
Alten has started to drink spirits; he began as soon as we decided to go back. He will be incapable by to–night, and it means that I shall have to take her in.
What hell this is, sitting in sodden clothes, with the stench of four days' living assaulting the nostrils, and a motion of the devil; the glass is very low and is slowly rising, so that I suppose it will blow harder soon, though it is about force eight at present.
I wonder what Zoe will have written in reply to my note. When I think of what I rejected and compare it with my beast–like existence here, I can hardly believe that I behaved as I did—what would I not give now to be transported back to the forest! At this rate of progress we shall take another 24 hours. I wonder if I can knock another half–knot out of her without smashing her up.
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The extraordinarily violent motion has upset the Anschutz. [15] The bearing cone of the stabilizing gyro has cracked, and the master compass began to wander off in circles. I was just resting for an hour or two, wedged up on a wet settee with coats equally wet, when her heavy pitching changed to a wallowing roll, and I heard the pilot, who was on watch, cursing down the voice–pipe, as we had sagged off our course.
I heard the voice of the helmsman querulously maintain that he was steering his course by Anschutz, so I got up and gingerly clawed my way into the control room, where I found by comparing Anschutz with magnetic that the former had gone to hell, the reason being obvious, as the stabilizer was exerting a strongly biased torque. I stopped the Anschutz and asked the pilot to give the helmsman a steady by magnetic.
As we staggered back to our course I heard a thud in the wardroom, and on returning to my settee found that Alten had rolled out of his bunk, where he was lying in a drunken stupor, and that he was face downwards, sprawling on the deck, half his face in the broken half of a dirty dish which had fallen off the table whilst I was having tea. As I couldn't let the crew see him like this, I was obliged to struggle and get him back into his bunk. He was like a log and absolutely incapable of rendering me any assistance, though he did open his eyes and mutter once or twice as I lifted him up, trunk first and then his legs. He stank of spirits and I hated touching him. Lord! what a truly hoggish man he is; yet I cannot help envying him his oblivion to these surroundings.
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