his legs and arms, in which costume he reported himself
to the War Office, and pleaded for one little day’s
extension of leave to make himself decent. “Not
a bit of it,” said the War Office. “If
you choose to spend your leave playing with sailor-men
and getting wet all over, that’s your
concern. You will return to duty by to-night’s
boat.” (This may be a libel on the W.O.,
but it sounds very like them.) “And he had to,”
said the boy, “but I expect he spent the next
week at Headquarters telling fat generals all about
the fight.”
“And, of course, the Admiralty gave you
all lots of leave?”
“Us? Yes, heaps. We had nothing to
do except clean down and oil up, and be ready to go
to sea again in a few hours.”
That little fact was brought out at the end of almost
every destroyer’s report. “Having
returned to base at such and such a time, I took in
oil, etc., and reported ready for sea at ——
o’clock.” When you think of the amount
of work a ship needs even after peace manoeuvres,
you can realise what has to be done on the heels of
an action. And, as there is nothing like housework
for the troubled soul of a woman, so a general clean-up
is good for sailors. I had this from a petty
officer who had also passed through deep waters.
“If you’ve seen your best friend go from
alongside you, and your own officer, and your own
boat’s crew with him, and things of that kind,
a man’s best comfort is small variegated jobs
which he is damned for continuous.”
Presently my friend of the destroyer went back to
his stark, desolate life, where feelings do not count,
and the fact of his being cold, wet, sea-sick, sleepless,
or dog-tired had no bearing whatever on his business,
which was to turn out at any hour in any weather and
do or endure, decently, according to ritual, what
that hour and that weather demanded. It is hard
to reach the kernel of Navy minds. The unbribable
seas and mechanisms they work on and through have given
them the simplicity of elements and machines.
The habit of dealing with swift accident, a life of
closest and strictest association with their own caste
as well as contact with all kinds of men all earth
over, have added an immense cunning to those qualities;
and that they are from early youth cut out of all
feelings that may come between them and their ends,
makes them more incomprehensible than Jesuits, even
to their own people. What, then, must they be
to the enemy?
Here is a Service which prowls forth and achieves,
at the lowest, something of a victory. How far-reaching
a one only the war’s end will reveal. It
returns in gloomy silence, broken by the occasional
hoot of the long-shore loafer, after issuing a bulletin
which though it may enlighten the professional mind
does not exhilarate the layman. Meantime the
enemy triumphs, wirelessly, far and wide. A few
frigid and perfunctory-seeming contradictions are
