The commander was playing his game out over again—stroke
by stroke. “With a beam-tube I’d
ha’ strafed him amidships,” he concluded.
“Why didn’t you then?” I asked.
There were loads of shiny reasons, which reminded
me that we were at war and cleared for action, and
that the interlude had been merely play. A companion
rose alongside and wanted to know whether we had seen
anything of her dummy.
“No. But we heard it,” was the short
answer.
I was rather annoyed, because I had seen that particular
daughter of destruction on the stocks only a short
time ago, and here she was grown up and talking about
her missing children!
In the harbour again, one found more submarines, all
patterns and makes and sizes, with rumours of yet
more and larger to follow. Naturally their men
say that we are only at the beginning of the submarine.
We shall have them presently for all purposes.
Now here is a mystery of the Service.
A man gets a boat which for two years becomes his
very self—
His morning hope, his evening
dream,
His joy throughout the day.
With him is a second in command, an engineer, and
some others. They prove each other’s souls
habitually every few days, by the direct test of peril,
till they act, think, and endure as a unit, in and
with the boat. That commander is transferred
to another boat. He tries to take with him if
he can, which he can’t, as many of his other
selves as possible. He is pitched into a new
type twice the size of the old one, with three times
as many gadgets, an unexplored temperament and unknown
leanings. After his first trip he comes back clamouring
for the head of her constructor, of his own second
in command, his engineer, his cox, and a few other
ratings. They for their part wish him dead on
the beach, because, last commission with So-and-so,
nothing ever went wrong anywhere. A fortnight
later you can remind the commander of what he said,
and he will deny every word of it. She’s
not, he says, so very vile—things considered—barring
her five-ton torpedo-derricks, the abominations of
her wireless, and the tropical temperature of her
beer-lockers. All of which signifies that the
new boat has found her soul, and her commander would
not change her for battle-cruisers. Therefore,
that he may remember he is the Service and not a branch
of it, he is after certain seasons shifted to a battle-cruiser,
where he lives in a blaze of admirals and aiguillettes,
responsible for vast decks and crypt-like flats, a
student of extended above-water tactics, thinking in
tens of thousands of yards instead of his modest but
deadly three to twelve hundred.
And the man who takes his place straight-way forgets
that he ever looked down on great rollers from a sixty-foot
bridge under the whole breadth of heaven, but crawls
and climbs and dives through conning-towers with those
same waves wet in his neck, and when the cruisers
pass him, tearing the deep open in half a gale, thanks
God he is not as they are, and goes to bed beneath
their distracted keels.
