“Three craft on our starboard beam, sir, coming up from the south-west,” he reported.
“What do they look like?” I demanded, rising to my feet and staring out in the direction toward which the boy pointed.
“I cannot yet say, sir,” he replied. “At present they are too far off to reveal their character; indeed, I doubt if I should have seen them so soon, but for the fact that I glimpsed the flames issuing from one of their funnels.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thanks, Mr Uchida, I see them too. Have the goodness to bring me the night-glass from the chart-house. They appear to be steaming with lights out.”
The lad hurried away, and quickly returned with the night-glass, which I focused and applied to my eye. The night was overcast, but there were a few stars blinking out between the clouds, which were flying fast up from the westward, and by their feeble, uncertain light I was presently able to distinguish a little more clearly the three small, shapeless blurs that Uchida’s keen eyes had detected. They were little more than shapeless blurs still, even when viewed through the powerful lenses of the night-glass; but I was able to distinguish that one of them was considerably bigger than the other two, which were much of a size. It was the funnel of the big fellow that was showing the flames, which seemed to indicate that she was being driven, while the other two appeared to be running easily. Yet all three were in company. The appearance of the two smaller craft seemed to suggest to me that they might possibly be destroyers; but what the other was, I could not guess. She was not big enough for a cruiser or a transport; and the fact that she was evidently being hard driven to enable her to keep pace with her consorts—or, possibly, escort—led me to doubt whether she was a warship of any kind. One thing was pretty clear, which was that, like ourselves, they were evidently bound for Kinchau Bay. Were they enemies or friends? If the former, it was eminently undesirable that they should be permitted to arrive, and it was for me to look into the matter.
“How’s her head?” I demanded of the helmsman.
“East, three degrees south,” he replied.
“Shift your helm to east, twenty-five degrees south,” I ordered; and the bows of the destroyer swung round until she was heading for a point at which we could intercept the strangers. Then: “Mr Uchida,” I said, “pass the word to prepare to make the private night signal.”
The signal was presently hoisted to the yard-arm and displayed for fully five minutes without evoking a response; and then I knew that the strangers were enemies. We accordingly hauled down the signal again and cleared for action, loading both torpedo tubes as well. This done, we quickened up our pace to full speed; for if we were going to have a fight, I wanted it to be out there in the open, so far away from the shore that the sounds of firing would not reach the Russians about Kinchau, and so apprise them of the presence of an enemy in the adjacent waters.
As we rapidly neared the enemy I made them out to be two destroyers, evidently escorting the third craft, which was a single-funnelled steamer of apparently about eighteen hundred tons. She sat deep in the water, as though loaded to her full capacity, but she was much too small for a transport, and for the life of me I could not imagine what her character might be. But there could be no doubt whatever concerning the destroyers; they were self-evident Russians, for they were four-funnelled, the funnels arranged in pairs, which was distinctly characteristic of a certain class of Russian destroyer.
Neither side wasted any time upon useless preliminaries; but it was the Russians who opened the ball by both craft firing, almost simultaneously, every gun they could bring to bear upon us. But their aim was nothing to boast of, for although we heard the shells screaming all about us, we remained untouched. Twice they fired upon us before I would give the word to our gun-layers, and both times ineffectively; then I gave the order to commence firing; and no sooner had the words passed my lips than our 12-pounder spoke, and a moment later there occurred two distinct explosions aboard the nearest Russian boat, which instantly became enveloped in a great cloud of steam. Apparently that first shot of ours had struck and exploded one of her boilers, for almost immediately she slackened speed and began to drop astern. This mishap, however, did not seem to in the least discourage her consort, which, putting on full speed, now dashed at us in the most determined and gallant manner, firing as she came, and receiving our fire in return. And then, for some ten minutes, we found ourselves engaged in a regular ding-dong fight, we and our antagonist closing to a distance of less than two hundred yards, and hammering away at each other as fast as the guns could be served.
But it very soon became apparent that our fellows were much the better and cooler gunners of the two; for whereas the Russians seemed to ram in their charges and let fly on the instant that their guns were loaded, our men waited, watching the roll both of their own ship and that of the enemy, and firing at her waterline as she rolled away from us, with the result that within the first five minutes of the fight a lucky shot from our 12-pounder sent a shell through her upturned bilge a foot or so below her normal waterline, blowing a hole through her thin plating that admitted a tremendous inrush of water every time that she rolled toward us. Her crew at once got out a collision mat and made the most desperate efforts to get it over and stop the leak; but our 6-pound quick-firers peppered them so severely that, after struggling manfully for two or three minutes, they were obliged to let the mat go, and lost it. Then they launched a torpedo at us, which missed us by inches only, whereupon I ordered our men to cease fire, and hailed the Russian to ask if she would surrender. But, not a bit of it; their reply, as translated to me by Hiraoka, who was an excellent Russian linguist, was, that they knew how to die, but not how to surrender; and the reply was accompanied by another salvo from every one of their guns that would bear. And this, too, at a moment when it became only too apparent that the boat was rapidly sinking. Since, therefore, it was evident that they were resolved to fight to the last, there was nothing for it but to open fire upon them afresh, much as I regretted it, as they obstinately persisted in keeping up a fire upon us.
The end, however, was nearer than even I thought, for we had fired but a few more shots at our opponent when there occurred a terrific explosion aboard her, instantly followed by several others, her deck opened up like the lid of a box, a great sheet of flame leapt up from her interior; and, seeming to break in two, the dismembered hull rapidly disappeared, the bow and stern portions rearing themselves out of water for a few seconds ere they plunged to the bottom, leaving nothing to show where the boat had been, save a great cloud of acrid smoke and steam, a few fragments of wreckage, and some half a dozen men struggling in the water.
Of course we instantly stopped our engines and launched a boat; but we only found and saved three men out of the boat’s total complement of forty-seven. We learned that the name of the lost destroyer was the Beztraschni, and that all of her officers had perished with her.
We now had leisure to attend to the other two craft, which were by this time some three miles astern, having apparently stopped their engines to await at a safe distance the course of events. Swinging round, we headed for them at full speed, with all guns loaded, and a torpedo in each tube, ready to open fire as soon as we got within effective range. As we drew nearer, however, it became evident that there was something very seriously wrong with the destroyer which we had first fired upon, and which had dropped astern, disabled, for there were boats in the water about her, seemingly passing between her and the other craft, boats going to her with only two or three hands in them, and leaving her loaded. By the time that we had arrived within a mile of her we could see that the destroyer was in a sinking condition; and a minute later we lost sight of her altogether: she had gone down.