A SMOKE SCREES EPISODE

Hokitika Guardian, 24 August 1918, Page 4

A SMOKE SCREES EPISODE

Somewhere at sea, somewhere during the day, and not so long since that it can be accounted even mediaeval history.

Motor Launch 1,000 and others of her kind were busily engaged making smoke-screens. Without | growing weary in the search lor it one could find a more pleasant occupation than this. But *“ e j Motor Launches seem to like it. j Deceiving the Idun into thinking i that Hades has started leaking I through the bottom of the North *. Sea is a' pretty little deception in which the M.L.s have specialised so j long that their expertness in putting up this asphyxiating bluff is geuerally conceded. And nopody else desires to rob them of either their reputation or their job. Turning your ship into a floating stinkpot does not appeal to everyoue —and there are dangers attaching to the metamorphosis, as witness MX. I,ooo’s experience. The string of M.L’sof which she loiined part had built up between the Hun runners on shore and certain of our ships on sea a long black wall of artificial fog, and were hard at work stuffing more body into this when the Hun had a brain-wave. “It’s of no use trying to shoot over these clouds that are by magic of the devil made, so I’ll shoot into them, he reasoned. As he reasoned, lie acted.

Down went his gun-muzzles, and shells from them began whizzing into the screen. One big projectile hit the sea just astern ot'.M.L. 1.000. As the shell exploded it blew her clean out of the water. Up she went some seven or eight feet above the surface, then

fell "back into the sea again. “ Plop ! ” “ Done in ! ” commented the other ships—but she wasn’t. “ Keep the smoke going,” shouted her C.O. as he jumped from the bridge to investigate. First he looked down the engineroom. There all was chaos. Both engines had been wrenched from their beds. The only one of them that’would work at all insisted upon working the wrong way. Peering next into his cabin, C.O. found it full of water. “ All mv boiled shirts gone,” he lamented. Now the flagship -bloomed like a rainbow with inquiries and instructions.

But the C.O. decided that badly as she was shaken ud 1,000 would float. So the gap in the smokescreen was closed and the MXlimped painfully across to a monitor. There she rested for a bit on one of the “blisters,” while the C.O borrowed a hefty pump. After this had been set going it kept down the water in her hull sufficiently to enable the MX- to be towed back to port. So you will see that making smoke-screens is no job lor the timid, though the M.L ’s seem to revel in it.