“And that,” said my informant, “put
the lid on!” Boanerges went down lest he should
be tempted to murder; and the tramp affirms she heard
him rumbling beneath her, like an inverted thunder-storm,
for fifteen minutes.
“All those tramps ought to be disarmed, and
we ought to have all their guns,” said
a voice out of a corner.
“What? Still worrying over your ’mug’?”
some one replied.
“He was a mug!” went on the man
of one idea. “If I’d had a couple
of twelves even, I could have strafed him proper.
I don’t know whether I shall mutiny, or desert,
or write to the First Sea Lord about it.”
“Strafe all Admiralty constructors to begin
with. I could build a better boat with a 4-inch
lathe and a sardine-tin than ——,”
the speaker named her by letter and number.
“That’s pure jealousy,” her commander
explained to the company. “Ever since I
installed—ahem!—my patent electric
washbasin he’s been intriguin’ to get
her. Why? We know he doesn’t wash.
He’d only use the basin to keep beer in.”
However often one meets it, as in this war one meets
it at every turn, one never gets used to the Holy
Spirit of Man at his job. The “common sweeper,”
growling over his mug of tea that there was “nothing
in sweepin’,” and these idly chaffing
men, new shaved and attired, from the gates of Death
which had let them through for the fiftieth time,
were all of the same fabric—incomprehensible,
I should imagine, to the enemy. And the stuff
held good throughout all the world—from
the Dardanelles to the Baltic, where only a little
while ago another batch of submarines had slipped
in and begun to be busy. I had spent some of
the afternoon in looking through reports of submarine
work in the Sea of Marmora. They read like the
diary of energetic weasels in an overcrowded chicken-run,
and the results for each boat were tabulated something
like a cricket score. There were no maiden overs.
One came across jewels of price set in the flat official
phraseology. For example, one man who was describing
some steps he was taking to remedy certain defects,
interjected casually: “At this point I had
to go under for a little, as a man in a boat was trying
to grab my periscope with his hand.” No
reference before or after to the said man or his fate.
Again: “Came across a dhow with a Turkish
skipper. He seemed so miserable that I let him
go.” And elsewhere in those waters, a submarine
overhauled a steamer full of Turkish passengers, some
of whom, arguing on their allies’ lines, promptly
leaped overboard. Our boat fished them out and
returned them, for she was not killing civilians.
In another affair, which included several ships (now
at the bottom) and one submarine, the commander relaxes
enough to note that: “The men behaved very
well under direct and flanking fire from rifles at
about fifteen yards.” This was not,
