The Scout’s quadruple funnel flames
      A mark from Sweden to the Swin,
    The Cruiser’s thundrous screw proclaims
      Her comings out and goings in: 
      But only whiffs of paraffin
    Or creamy rings that fizz and fade
      Show where the one-eyed Death has been. 
    That is the custom of “The Trade.”

    Their feats, their fortunes and their fames
      Are hidden from their nearest kin;
    No eager public backs or blames,
      No journal prints the yarns they spin
      (The Censor would not let it in!)
    When they return from run or raid. 
      Unheard they work, unseen they win. 
    That is the custom of “The Trade.”

I

SOME WORK IN THE BALTIC

No one knows how the title of “The Trade” came to be applied to the Submarine Service.  Some say that the cruisers invented it because they pretend that submarine officers look like unwashed chauffeurs.  Others think it sprang forth by itself, which means that it was coined by the Lower Deck, where they always have the proper names for things.  Whatever the truth, the Submarine Service is now “the trade”; and if you ask them why, they will answer:  “What else could you call it?  The Trade’s ‘the trade,’ of course.”

It is a close corporation; yet it recruits its men and officers from every class that uses the sea and engines, as well as from many classes that never expected to deal with either.  It takes them; they disappear for a while and return changed to their very souls, for the Trade lives in a world without precedents, of which no generation has had any previous experience—­a world still being made and enlarged daily.  It creates and settles its own problems as it goes along, and if it cannot help itself no one else can.  So the Trade lives in the dark and thinks out inconceivable and impossible things which it afterwards puts into practice.

It keeps books, too, as honest traders should.  They are almost as bald as ledgers, and are written up, hour by hour, on a little sliding table that pulls out from beneath the commander’s bunk.  In due time they go to my Lords of the Admiralty, who presently circulate a few carefully watered extracts for the confidential information of the junior officers of the Trade, that these may see what things are done and how.  The juniors read but laugh.  They have heard the stories, with all the flaming detail and much of the language, either from a chief actor while they perched deferentially on the edge of a mess-room fender, or from his subordinate, in which case they were not so deferential, or from some returned member of the crew present on the occasion, who, between half-shut teeth at the wheel, jerks out what really happened.  There is very little going on in the Trade that the Trade does not know within a reasonable time.  But the outside world must wait until my Lords of the Admiralty release the records.  Some of them have been released now.