THE NAVY ETERNAL

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Navy Eternal

WHICH IS
THE NAVY-THAT-FLOATS
THE NAVY-THAT-FLIES
AND THE NAVY-UNDER-THE-SEA
BY
“BARTIMEUS”
Drawings by DOUGLAS SWALE

HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
Printed in Great Britain by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld.,
London and Aylesbury.
DEDICATED TO
Captain
GORDON CAMPBELL, V.C., D.S.O.,
Royal Navy.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PROLOGUE

Anyone familiar with the River Dart knows the Mill Creek. The hills on either side slope steeply down to the edge of the water, oak and beech and elm clustering thick on the one hand, red plough, green shoots, and golden corn-fields alternating on the other through all the changing seasons.

The creek is tidal, transformed at half-flood into a fair expanse of shimmering water; at low tide, however, it dwindles to a score of meagre channels winding tortuously through whale-backed mudbanks, the haunt of scurrying crabs and meditative heron.

Here, one afternoon in midsummer some dozen years ago, came a gig (or, in local parlance, a “blue-boat”) manned by seven flannel-clad cadets from the Naval College. Six sat on the thwarts pulling lazily against the last of the ebb. The seventh sat in the stern, with the yoke-lines over his shoulders, refreshing himself with cherries out of a bag.

As they approached the shelving mudbanks, purple in the afternoon sunlight, the figure in the bows boated his oar and began to sound cautiously with his boathook. The remaining five oarsmen glanced back over their shoulders and continued paddling. The helmsman smiled tolerantly, as a man might smile at the conceits of childhood, but refrained from speech. They all knew the weakness of the bowman for dabbling in mud.

“Half a point to port!” said the slim form wielding the dripping boathook. “I can see the channel now.... Steady as you go!” A minute later the boat slid into the main channel and the crew drew in their oars, punting their narrow craft between the banks of ooze. None of them spoke, save the bowman, and he only at rare intervals, flinging back a curt direction to the helmsman over his shoulder.

For half an hour they navigated the channels winding up the valley, and came at length to a crumbling stone quay beside the ruin of a mill. Ferns grew in the interstices of the old brickwork, and a great peace brooded over the silent wood that towered behind. They made the boat fast there; and because boats and the sea were things as yet half-unknown and wholly attractive, none of them attempted to land. Instead, with coats rolled up as pillows and their straw hats tilted over their eyes, the seven made themselves comfortable as only naval cadets could in such cramped surroundings, and from under the thwarts each one drew a paper bag and a bottle of lemonade.

“Dead low water,” said Number 1 (the bow oar) presently. “We shall have a young flood against us going back; but then there’s no chance of getting stuck on the mud.” He drew a bunch of keys from his pocket and proceeded to take careful soundings round the boat, using the keys as a sinker and the lanyard as a lead-line.

“Oh, shut up about your everlasting tides,” said Number 2, “and keep quiet; I want to sleep.”

“They interest me,” replied Number 1 simply. “I shall be a navigator, I think.”

“You’d better go in for submarines,” said Number 4, applying himself to his bottle of fizzing beverage. “Plenty of poking about mudbanks in them if it interests you. One of the first we ever had stuck in the mud one day and never came up again.”

“P’raps I shall,” admitted the bow. “In fact I shouldn’t be surprised if I did go in for submarining.”

Number 3 was lying on his back on the thwart, his head resting on the gunwale. “They’ll never come to anything,” he said. “The submarine’s a failure.” His eyes followed the flight of a white-winged gull that circled with outstretched wings far above their heads. “No. It’s going to be in the air, when we have a war. I’m all for flying machines....” He was silent awhile meditating, then turned his head quickly. “Bombs!” he said. “Fancy being able to drop bombs all over an enemy’s country.”

“You couldn’t do it,” said Number 2. “You’d go killing women and civilians. They’d never let you.”

“Who?” demanded the prospective aviator, his enthusiasm rather damped. “Who’d stop me?”

“International Law,” cut in the coxswain quickly. “Conventions and all that.... Why, there’d be no limit to anything if it weren’t for international law. An enemy could go off in his beastly submarine and paralyse the trade routes.”

“Paralyse ’em—how?” inquired the bow man.

“Just torpedoing ’em, of course, you ass.”

“What, merchant ships?”

The jurist nodded.

“But no one could do that. I mean you’d never get a naval officer to do that, international law or no international law. That ’ud be piracy—like those fellows at Algiers. ’Member the lecture last week?”

“I don’t mean we’d do it,” conceded the coxswain. “But some nations might.”

The idealist shook his head. “No naval officer would,” he repeated stoutly, “whatever his nationality.”

“The surface of the sea’s good enough for me,” chipped in No. 2. “I don’t want to bomb women or torpedo merchant ships. I’m going to be captain of a destroyer.” He raised his head. “Thirty knots at night, my boy!... Upper-deck torpedo tubes and all that....”

“I’d blow you out of the water with a 12-inch gun,” said Number 5, speaking for the first time, and laying aside a magazine. “Gunnery is going to save this country if ever we have a war. That’s why gunnery lieutenants get promoted quickly—my governor told me so.”

“Did he?” said the stroke oar. “He’s wrong. You can only fire big guns from big ships, and you know what happened to big ships in the Russo-Japanese war.”

“What?” inquired the visionary coldly.

“Mines. Big ships can’t move when there are mines about.”

“We don’t use mines any longer,” said the coxswain, crumpling up his empty bag and throwing it over the side. It floated slowly past the boat towards the head of the valley. “They’re not considered sporting. ’Sides, even if you could, you can always countermine, and sweep ’em up. My brother went through a course in the Mediterranean once—place called Platea. I remember him telling me about it.”

The stroke oar sat upright and glanced the length of the boat. “Wouldn’t it be a rum thing,” he said, “if there was a war some day and we were all in it.” He ticked off their names on his fingers: “Submarine, aeroplane, destroyer, minelayer, minesweeper, battleship——” He paused. “I’d like to be in a cruiser,” he said. “A big cruiser scouting ahead of the Fleet. You’d get more excitement there than anywhere.” His voice deepened to a sudden note of triumph. “It ’ud be the forefront of the battle.”

“Then we’d all meet afterwards,” said Number 2, “and have a blow-out somewhere ashore and talk about our experiences. Wouldn’t that be topping?”

The bow oar sat with his eyes on the crumpled paper bag that floated up-stream, shading them against the glow of the sun turning all the creeks into molten gold. “Those of us that were left,” he said dreamily. “Tide’s turned.... We’d better think about getting back.”

CHAPTER I
“USQUE AB OVO”

Reminiscences of those days “in the distance enchanted” never come in an orderly procession according to the original sequence of events. Some, for reasons quite inexplicable, jostle their way to the fore readily enough. Others, dim and elusive, hover in the background, and only respond to the lure of firelight and tobacco smoke ascending incense-wise from the depths of the arm-chair.

Sooner or later, though, they can all be caught and held for the moment needed to record them. The difficulty is to know where to start....

Harker is foremost among the “thrusters” in the surging crowd of memories of the old Britannia days. Harker, with his piercing, rather melancholy eyes, his black beard and tattooed wrists, and his air of implacable ferocity that for months succeeded in concealing from his term a heart as tender as a woman’s.

His name was not actually Harker, of course; but he is probably still alive, and even retired chief petty officers of the Royal Navy have their susceptibilities. He was a term C.P.O.—mentor, wet-nurse, “sea-daddy,” the outward and visible embodiment of Naval Discipline to sixty-odd naval cadets who yesterday were raw schoolboys and to-day wear the King’s uniform and eke brass buttons—a transition unhinging enough to more matured souls than those of his charges.

How he succeeded in conveying within the space of the first evening the exceedingly unfamiliar routine of training-ship life, the art of turning into a hammock, the necessity for keeping their chests locked, the majesty of the term lieutenant and the omnipotence of the chief cadet captains, to sixty bewildered fifteen-year-olds, only he knows.

Yet he harried none; they were conscious of him as a flock of disconcerted sheep are aware of a wise collie. His voice was never still: it was to be presumed that he slept at some mysterious time during the twenty-four hours, and yet his square, compact form seemed to be always drifting about at all hours of the day and night. Even when a hapless wight (in the throes of nightmare) tipped bodily out of his hammock on to the deck the first night, it was Harker who appeared noiselessly out of the shadows to tuck him in again.

Their names he had pat within twenty-four hours; this tightened his grip of the term instantly, but it also caused him to be regarded as scarcely canny. Indeed, it was disconcerting enough to regard yourself one moment as an insignificant and unknown unit among 250 others, and in this comfortable reflection to lean in a dégagé attitude against the white paintwork (one of the seven deadly sins): then to hear admonition and your name, coupled together like chain-shot, ring out along the crowded main-deck. Harker had seen you.

There were other C.P.O.’s on board: each term owned one. But they were, by comparison with Harker, sorry fellows. One was reputed to be given to beating the big drum at Salvation Army meetings ashore, garbed, moreover, in a scarlet jersey. Hotly his term denied it, but the story was stamped with the unimpeachable authority of the boatswain’s mate of the lower-deck: a godless seaman, conversation with whom, being of a spicy and anecdotal nature, was forbidden.

Another was admittedly of a good enough heart, but a sentimentalist, and consequently to be despised. On the occasion of the chastisement of an evil-doer, his was the arm chosen to administer the strokes with all the pomp and circumstance of an official execution. He laid the strokes on well and truly—that much the victim himself admitted. But when he turned from his duty his eyes were observed to have tears in them. His term had in consequence to adopt an apologetic manner for a considerable time afterwards.

It was a similar scene, but one in which Harker played the Lord High Executioner, that must here be recorded. The setting alone was sufficient to strike awe and even terror into the spectator’s hearts. And now, after the lapse of years, recalling the circumstances of that harrowing quarter of an hour, it is doubtful whether there was not just some such motive behind the grim circumstance that led up to the painful consummation.

The scene was the orlop-deck. What light there was came in through the open gunports, slanting upwards off the water. Not cheering sunlight, you understand, but a greenish sickly gleam that struggled ineffectually with the shadows clinging like vampires among the low oak beams overhead.

The victim’s term were fallen-in in a hollow square about the horse—a block of wood supported on short legs, with ring-bolts and canvas straps hanging from each corner. Then there came a pause. Possibly the captain had not finished his breakfast; or perhaps Harker had for once made a mistake and got his term there too early. But for the space of several minutes (or weeks, or years) the term stood in shuddering contemplation of this engine.

Then one of the spectators, the victim of either an over-rich imagination or an acutely sensitive conscience, dramatically fainted and was borne forth. After that things began to happen. The malefactor appeared, accompanied by Harker. The captain, the term lieutenant, and (a thrill ran through the on-lookers) the surgeon followed. It was half-expected that the chaplain would also join the group and administer ghostly consolation to the culprit, who, it must be reluctantly admitted, looked rather pleased with himself.

His offence was not one to alienate him from the hearts of his fellows. If memory serves aright, he had been overheard to refer to his late crammer in terms that may or may not have been just, but were certainly not the way a little gentleman should talk. But his term—or most of them—were still smarting under the recollections of crammers’ methods and were disposed to regard the delinquent’s lapse rather more as a pardonable ebullition of feeling than a breach of morality. In short he was a bit of a hero.

“Chief Petty Officer Harker,” said the stern voice of the term lieutenant, “do your duty.” The harrowing preliminaries completed, Chief Petty Officer Harker did it, as was to be expected of him, uncommonly well.

The victim took it, as was also to be expected of him, uncommonly well. It was not long before these lines were written that he was called upon to meet a sterner and his last ordeal. The pity is that no spectator can bear testimony to the worthier courage with which he must have met it.

Harker it was who smelt out, like a Zulu witch-doctor, the grass snake and dormouse that lived a life of communistic ease and reflection in the washing till of someone’s sea-chest. Harker’s the suspicious mind that led to official “ruxes” of private tills, and the confiscation of meerschaum pipes, Turkish cigarettes, and other contraband. Yet all this without any effect of espionage.

The nearest approach to active espionage that Harker permitted himself was hovering in the vicinity of the gangway when the terms were landed for daily recreation. The law of the Medes and Persians had it that during cold weather all cadets not playing games must land wearing a particularly despicable form of under-garment: a woolly and tucked-into-the-socks abomination that the soul of every right-minded cadet revolted from. As the procession passed under the low gangway on its way to the launches alongside, Harker, lurking in the vicinity, would suddenly pounce upon a suspect.

“’Ave we got our DRAWERS on, Mr. So-and-so?” came the merciless query. The progress of the procession was arrested while Mr. So-and-so racked his brains for some suitable parry to this very leading question. A damning negative having eventually been extorted, the underclad one was hauled from the ranks and given three minutes in which to get to his chest, extract from his wardrobe the garment that found such high favour in Olympian eyes, put it on, and rejoin the tail of the procession. Thus a first offender; a second offence resulted in “no landing.” There was no appeal.

The muddy, tired, ever-hungry throng that returned some three hours later again passed on board under this lynx-eyed surveillance. This time illicit “stodge” was the subject of Harker’s unquenchable suspicions.

Smuggling stodge on board (another of the seven deadly sins) required considerable ingenuity, owing to the ban the authorities thought necessary to impose on pockets. Regular outfitters pandered to this Olympian whim, and constructed trousers with an embryonic fob just large enough to hold a few coins. The unorthodox, who arrived with garments bearing the stamp of provincialism and pockets, were bidden to surrender them forthwith, and stout fingers ruthlessly sewed the pockets up.

The jacket had only one, a breast pocket already congested by keys, handkerchief, letters from home, pet bits of indiarubber, and the like. Remained therefore the despised garment already alluded to. This, being tucked—by official decree—into the wearer’s socks, formed an admirable hold-all for a packet of butterscotch—worked flat—a snack of Turkish Delight, or a peculiar and highly favoured form of delicacy known as “My Queen.”

With a not too saintly expression, an unflinching eye, and a sufficiently baggy pair of trousers, the contrabandist might count on a reasonable amount of success. But Harker’s X-ray glance rarely failed him.

That stern, incisive voice would rivet all eyes upon the culprit just when the muster by the officer of the day had been completed, and the long ranks awaited the stentorian dismissal of the chief cadet captain.

“Mr. Z! You’ll step along to the sick-bay when we falls out.”

The blanched smuggler clutched at his momentarily abandoned halo of rectitude.

“Sick-bay!” he echoed indignantly. “Why the sick-bay? There’s nothing wrong with me—I swear there isn’t. I never felt better in my life.”

“That there nasty swelling on your shin,” was the pitiless reply, “did ought to be seen to at once.” A draught, that had fluttered the carefully selected baggy trousers against their wearer’s legs, had been his undoing. The game was up.

Like all truly great men, Harker could unbend without discipline suffering an iota. As the months passed and his term of fledgling “News” acquired the modest dignity of “Threes” (second term cadets), Marker’s methods changed. He was no longer the detective, inquisitor, encyclopædia of a thousand unfamiliar phrases, events, and objects. His term were on their feet now, treading in their turn paths fiercely illumined by the new first term’s gaping admiration and curiosity. They were an example.

“’Ow long ’ave we been in the Britannia?” he would demand reproachfully when some breach of the laws called for reproof. “’Ere we are in our second term, an’ talkin’ about HUP-STAIRS!”

The scorn in his voice was like a whiplash.

“When you young gentlemen goes to sea you won’t find no STAIRS!”

When they went to sea! That was the gradually increasing burden of his song. For a while it presented a picture too remote almost for serious contemplation. It was practically a figure of speech, meaningless. But as time went on, and the successive dignities of “Sixer” and “Niner” (third and fourth—the last—terms) loomed up and passed into reality, and at last the Great Wall of the final examination alone stood between them and the sea-going gunrooms of the Fleet, the words took on their real significance.

Harker abandoned even sarcasm. He became guide, philosopher, and friend, a patient mentor always accessible—generally somewhere on the chest-deck—in leisure hours to thirsters after knowledge. Was one shaky in that branch of nautical lore known as “Bends and Hitches”? Harker’s blunt fingers tirelessly manipulated the end of a hammock-lashing until the pupil could make even a “sheep-shank” with his eyes shut.

Another would bring him, in a welter of grease and ravelled strands, a tortured mass of hemp-rope.

“It’s meant to be a Long Splice,” was the explanation, “but I don’t seem to get it right—ever,” and with a despondent sigh it would be thrust into Harker’s hands.

Harker would examine the interwoven strands, twisting it to and fro with jerks of his powerful wrists, pulling taut here, tucking something in there, and lo! the thing took shape.

“This is where you goes wrong, Mr. P., every time!” (Recollect there were sixty-odd in his term.) “Don’t forget what I’m always telling you. You splits the middle strands, and then an over-’and knot in the opposite ’alves....” It always looked so easy when Harker did it.

It was during the last night on board that Harker rose to heights truly magnanimous. The fourth term regarded it as its right and privilege, on the last night of the term, to hold high carnival until sleep overtook them. Cadet captains even cast their responsibilities to the winds that night and scampered about, slim, pyjama-clad figures, in the dim light of the lanterns, ruthlessly cutting down the prig who yearned for slumber, lashing-up a victim in his hammock and leaving him upside-down to reflect on certain deeds of the past year that earned him this retribution, floating about on gratings on the surface of the plunge baths, and generally celebrating in a fitting manner the eve of the day that was to herald in new responsibilities and cares.

Harker, who for fifteen months had haunted the shadows on the look-out for just such a “rux,” whose ear caught every illicit sound—even the crunch of the nocturnal butterscotch—Harker was for once unseeing and unseen. It needed but this crowning act of grace to endear him for ever to his departing flock.

Yet he had one more card to play, and played it as he passed in farewell from carriage to carriage of the departing train. Further, he dealt it with accentuated emphasis for the benefit of those he thought needed the reminder most.

“Gosh!” ejaculated such a one when Harker passed to the next carriage: he flopped back on to his seat. “Did you hear? He said ‘sir!’ to each one of us when he said good-bye!”

So much for Harker. But he brought with him a number of other memories entangled somehow about his personality, and on these it may be as well to enlarge a little ere they slip back into the limbo of the forgotten past.

It says much for the vividness of Harker’s personality that he outran in these reminiscences the memory of “Stodge.” Certainly few interests loomed larger on the horizon of these days than the contents of the two canteens ashore.

There was one adjacent to the landing-place: a wise forethought of the authorities, enabling a fellow to stay his stomach during the long climb from the river to the playing fields, where the principal canteen stood.

“Stodge” was of a surpassing cheapness. That much was essential when the extent of the weekly pocket-money was limited (if memory is to be trusted) to one shilling. Further it was of a pleasing variety, certain peculiar combinations, hallowed by tradition, being alone unchanging.

Of these the most popular was the “Garry Sandwich.” Components: a half-stick of chocolate cream sandwiched between two “squashed-fly” biscuits; the whole beaten thin with a cricket-bat, gymnasium shoe, or other implement handy. The peculiarity of this particular form of dainty was that it sufficed as an unfailing bribe wherewith to open negotiations with one Dunn, the septuagenarian keeper of the pleasure boats. The moral atmosphere of the boat-house, in consequence of its custodian’s sweetness of tooth, came in time to resemble that of a Chinese yamen.

Another delicacy about which legend clustered was the “Ship’s Bun,” split in half, with a liberal cementing of Devonshire cream and strawberry jam oozing out at the sides. Concerning the bun itself, the maternal solicitude of the authorities extended one gratis to each cadet ashore on half-holidays lest the impecunious should hunger unnecessarily between lunch and tea. The buns were obtainable on application at the counter, whence the daughter of the proprietor—whom we will call Maunder—was charged with the duty of issuing them.

How she pretended to remember the two and a half hundred faces that presented themselves in surging crowds round the counter at 4 p.m. is more than her present recorder can say. But even as she extended a bun to the outstretched grubby hand of a suppliant, an expression of vixen-like indignation and cunning would transform her features.

“You’ve ’ad a bun afore!” she would snap shrilly, withdrawing the bounty in the nick of time. The hungry petitioner, cheerfully acknowledging defeat in a game of bluff, would then withdraw, pursued by Miss Maunder’s invective.

All the same she was not infallible, and on occasions hot protestations and even mutual recrimination rang to and fro across the counter. Appeal, ultimately carried to Mr. Maunder, was treated in much the same way as it is by croupiers at Monte Carlo. A gentleman’s word is his word. But it is as well not to be the victim of too many mistakes.

Maunder, who was occupied with the stern responsibility of catering for the whim of the rich, had a way of recapitulating the orders from the beginning, adding up aloud as the count went on, thus:

Cadet: A strawberry ice, please, Maunder.

Maunder: One strawberry ice tuppence.

Cadet: Oh, and a doughnut, while you’re about it.

Maunder: One strawberry ice one doughnut thruppence.

Cadet: That’s just to go on with. Then in a bag I want a stick of cream chocolate——

Maunder: One strawberry ice one doughnut one stick cream chocolate fourpence.

Cadet: (breathlessly) And a bottle of barley sugar and a “My Queen” and four Garry biscuits and half a pound of cherries and a bottle of lemonade and one of ginger beer and—that’s all, I think.

Maunder: (coming in a little behind, chanting, the general effect being that of a duet in canon). One strawberry ice one doughnut one stick cream chocolate one bottle barley sugar one “My Queen,” etc., etc., etc.... And a bag one an thruppence ’a’-penny.... Thank you, sir. Next, please.

On occasion demigods walked among the children of men. The visits of the Channel Fleet to Torbay usually brought over one or two of a lately departed term, now midshipmen by the grace of God and magnificent beyond conception.

It was their pleasure, these immaculately clad visitors, to enter the canteen, greet Maunder with easy familiarity and Miss Maunder with something approaching gallantry, slap down a sovereign on the counter and cry free stodge all round. They would even unbend further, dallying with a strawberry ice in token of their willingness to be as other men, and finally depart in a cloud of cigarette smoke and hero-worship.

This record is not concerned with the fact that on their return on board their ship, some hours later, one suffered stripes for having forgotten to lock his chest before he went ashore, and the other, being the most junior of all the junior midshipmen, was bidden swiftly to unlace the sub’s boots and fetch his slippers.

To every dog his day.

Random memories such as these necessarily present individuals and incidents, not in the sequence of their importance in the cosmos as one sees it now, but as they appeared to the vision of the Naval Cadet, whose world was an amiable Chaos.

Thus the Captain flickers through this kaleidoscope an awesome bearded figure, infinitely remote from the small affairs of that teeming rabbit-warren of youth. More readily comes to mind the picture of his lady wife, white-haired, with clear eyes and gentle voice, a memory somehow entangled with geraniums in red pots about the moulded stern-gallery and tea on Sunday afternoons in the spacious chintz-draped after-cabin: with irksome football sprains, and brief puerile illnesses made more endurable by her visits to the cotside.

The Commander, though less awesome than the Captain, approached the mortal in that he stooped at times to wrath. His was the cold eye before which the more hardened malefactors quailed; his the rasping voice that jerked the four terms to attention at Divisions each morning:

“Young Gentlemen, ’shun!”

The English public schoolboy is conscious of youth, and takes the fact of being a gentleman for granted. But to hear himself addressed by a designation that combined both qualities was a never-staling subject for inward mirth and a weird self-congratulation difficult of analysis. It conveyed a hint of coming manhood and responsibilities: it was the voice of the Navy, bending on the leading strings, heard for the first time.

But on a plane far nearer earth stood the Term Lieutenants, each one the god and hero, the Big Brother of his term. That they, their Boxer or South African medal ribbons, their tattoo-marks, County or International caps, biceps, and all the things that were theirs, were the objects of their respective Terms’ slavish adulation, goes without saying. Bloody encounters between their self-appointed champions over an adverse criticism or doubt cast upon a forgotten word were not unknown. Two entire terms once joined battle and bled each other’s noses the length and breadth of the echoing “Skipper Woods” to clinch some far-flung argument as to the merits of their respective “Loots.”

There were but four Term Lieutenants, and they were picked from the wardrooms of the whole Navy. Small wonder some three hundred grubby urchins fresh from school found in them admirable qualities.

Their example and teaching were the moulds into which, year by year, the molten metal of the Navy’s officer-personnel was poured, thence to be scattered about the seven seas, tempered by winds and stress, and, in God’s good time, tested to the uttermost.

Ashore, on the playing fields or across the red ploughland at the tails of the beagles, they laboured in close intimate fellowship with these atoms of clay thrust by providence beneath their thumbs. But on board it seemed they faded from ken, being rarely seen save at classes and musters, or when in pairs the Term percolated through the wardroom for dessert, plastered as to the hair, patent leather shod, to sip and cough over a glass of ambrosial port at either elbow of their Lieutenant.

Seeing and unseen, knowing their Terms as only men who spend their lives among men can know and understand the embryo, they were the guiding invisible wisdom behind the Cadet Captains, who outwardly ruled the decks.

The Cadet Captains were chosen from the three senior Terms, set apart from their fellows by the fact that they wore “standup” collars and a triangular gold badge on the left cuff.

Minor Authority in other guises was greeted much the same as it is in all communities of boyhood. The platitudes of notice boards no fellow with his heart in the right place could be expected to remember over well. The acknowledged sway of instructors and masters was largely a matter of knowing to a nicety how far an adventurous spirit could go (in the realms of Science and Freehand Drawing it was a long way) before the badgered pedagogue turned and bit. Terms paid strict allegiance to their own Chief Petty Officers. But, as has already been shown, this was an affair of the heart and the sentiments. He was theirs, and they were his: thus it had been from the beginning.

There was, however, one voice that rarely repeated an order, one court from which appeal, if possible, was undreamed of—that of the Cadet Captain. Their rule was without vexatious tyranny, but it was an iron rule. The selection of these Cadet Captains was done carefully, and mistakes were few. The standard of the whole was no mean one, and for three months the Lieutenant of the First Term had been studying the raw material, working with it, playing with it, talking to it—or rather listening while it talked to him.... Thus Cadet Captains were chosen, and the queer eager loyalty with which the rest paid them allegiance was the first stirring of the quickened Naval Spirit, foreshadowing that strange fellowship to be, brotherhood of discipline and control, of austerity and a half-mocking affectionate tolerance.

To the Cadet Captains perhaps can be attributed the passage, almost untarnished through the years, of the Britannia traditions. They were concerned, these youthful Justices of the Peace, with more than the written law. It they enforced right enough, but with a tolerance one might expect of fifteen summers administering the foibles and rules of fifty. On the other hand, did a “new” unbutton a single button of his monkey jacket, a “Three” deign to swing his keys, a “Sixer” to turn up his trousers or tilt his cap on the back of his head (the prerogative of the “Niner” or Fourth Term), and Nemesis descended upon him ere he slept that night. Nemesis, by virtue of its unblemished character and the favour its triangular badge found in the eyes of the gods, was allowed to turn in half an hour after the remainder. It occupied itself during this time in guzzling cocoa and biscuits smeared with strawberry jam, provided for its delectation by the authorities—though the cost was said to be defrayed by the parents of the common herd relegated to hammocks and the contemplation of this orgy out of one drowsy though envious eye.

Biscuits finished, Nemesis would draw from his pocket a knotted “togie” of hemp, and, having removed traces of jam from his features, proceed to administer summary justice in the gloom where the hammocks swung.

It was of course grossly illegal and stigmatised by the authorities as “a pernicious system of private and unauthorised punishments.” But the alternative was open to any who cared to appeal to Cæsar. Appealing to Cæsar meant spending subsequent golden afternoons on the parade ground, swinging a heavy bar bell to the time of “Sweet Dreamland Faces” blared out on a cornet by a bored bandsman.

So summary justice ruled, and it ruled in this wise:

“Shove your knuckles outside that blanket—you needn’t pretend to be asleep——”

Chorus of snores deafening in their realism and self-conscious rectitude from the wrong-doer’s neighbours.

“You were slack attending belly-muster for the third time running——”[1]

“I swear——”

“You’d better not. You’ll get six more for swearing——”

“Ow!”

“Don’t make such a rux....”

“Ow!”

“If you yell you’ll get double.”

“Ow!”

“That’s for being slack. Now the other hand.... That’s for ’nerving’” (modernised = swanking) “with your thumbs in your beckets——”

“Ow!”

“Shut up! Stick your knuckles out properly.”

“I swear I didn’t—ow!... Good night.”

. . . . .

Memories, ah, memories! Haphazard but happy as only the far-off things can seem, half revealed through the mists of years. Grim old cradle of the Eternal Navy, there lies on my desk a blotting-pad hewed from your salt timbers; it may be that some whimsical ghost strayed out of it to provoke these random recollections. Does it, I wonder, ever unite with other ghosts from chiselled garden-seat or carved candle-stick, and there on the moonlit waters of the Dart refashion, rib by rib, keel and strake and stempost, a Shadow Ship?

And what of the Longshoremen Billies that plied for hire between the shore and the after-gangway—Johnnie Farr (whom the Good Lawd durstn’t love), Hannaford of the wooden leg, and all the rest of that shell-backed fraternity? Gone to the haven of all good ships and sailormen: and only the night wind, abroad beneath the stars, whispers to the quiet hills the tales of sharks and pirates and the Chiny seas that once were yours and ours.

But what familiar faces throng once more the old decks and cluster round the empty ports! Is it only to fond memory that you seemed the cheeriest and noblest, or did some beam of the glory to be yours stray out of the Hereafter and paint your boyish faces thus, O best-remembered from those far-off days?

You crowd too quickly now, you whose fair names are legion, so that the splendour of your sacrifices blur and intermingle. The North Sea knows you and the hidden Belgian minefields; the Aurora Borealis was the candle that lit some to bed, and the surf on the beaches of Gallipoli murmurs to others a never-ending lullaby. Ostend and Zeebrugge will not forget you, and the countless tales of your passing shall be the sword hilt on which our children’s children shall cut their teeth.

From out of that Shadow Ship lying at her moorings off the old Mill Creek comes the faint echoes of your boyish voices floating out across the placid tide. Could we but listen hard enough we might catch some message of good hope and encouragement from you who have had your Day:

“We are the Dead....
. . . . .
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high:
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep....”

There shall be no faith broken. God rest you, merry Gentlemen.

CHAPTER II
IN THE TWILIGHT

I. Heavy Metal

It was still dark when the battle cruisers slipped from their moorings and began to feel their way towards the unseen entrance of the harbour. From the bridge of each mass of towering indeterminate shadows the stern light of the next ahead could be discerned dimly through binoculars, and on those pin-points of light they steered. What the battle cruiser flagship steered by, in the narrow confines of the crowded harbour and the inky darkness, only the little knot of figures on her forebridge knew: the admiral and flag captain, the navigator and officer-of-the-watch, muffled in duffle coats and moving mysteriously about the glow-worm arc of light from the binnacle and charttable.

One by one the long black shapes slid through the outer defences, ebon shadows in a world of shades. The voices of the leadsmen in the chains blended their mournful intermittent chant with the rush of water past the ship’s side; to all but the ears of the watchful figures on the bridges the sound was swallowed by the dirge of the funnel stays and halliards in the cold wind heralding the dawn.

The red and green lights on the gate-marking vessels winked and bobbed in the swell caused by the passage of the grim host. It passed with incredible swiftness; and before the troubled waters began to quiet, the escorting destroyers came pelting up astern, heralded by the rush and rattle of spray-thrashed steel, funnels glowing, and the roar of their fans pouring out from the engine-room exhausts. Night and the mystery of the darkness enfolded them. The gates closed upon their churning wakes and the tumult of their passing. Dawn glimmered pale behind the hills and broadened slowly into day; it found the harbour empty, save for small craft. Beyond the headlands, beyond the mist-enshrouded horizon, the battle cruisers were abroad, unleashed.

Once clear of their protecting minefields, the battle cruisers moved south at high speed, with their smoke trailing astern in broad zig-zags across a grey sky. At intervals they altered course simultaneously and then swung back to their original path, flinging the grey seas asunder from each gaunt, axe-headed bow as they turned.

They scarcely resembled ships, in their remorseless, purposeful rush under the lowering sky. The screening T.B.D.’s spread fan-wise on their flanks were dwarfed to insignificance beside these stupendous destroyers with the smoke pouring from their huge funnels, and nothing to break their stark nakedness of outline but the hooded guns. Men lived on board them, it is true: under each White Ensign a thousand souls laboured out each one its insignificant destiny. They were entities invisible like mites in a cheese; but the ships that bore them were instruments, visible enough, of the triumphant destiny of an empire.

As far as the eye could reach, the battle cruisers were alone on that grey waste of water. But swift as was their passage, something swifter overtook them out of the north as the morning wore on. It was the voice of the battle fleet moving south in support. “Speed so-and-so, on such-and-such a course,” flickered the curt cipher messages through sixty miles of space. And south they came in battle array, battleships, light cruisers, and destroyers, ringed by the misty horizon of the North Sea, with the calling gulls following the white furrows of their keels like crows after the plough.

A division of light cruisers, driving through the crested seas at the speed of a galloping horse, linked the battle fleet with the battle cruisers. Seen from either force they were but wraiths of smoke on the horizon: but ever and anon a daylight searchlight winked out of the mist, spanning the leagues with soundless talk.

It was still early afternoon when a trail of bubbles flickered ahead of the flagship of the battle fleet’s lee line. It crossed at right angles to their course, and a thousand yards abeam of the third ship in the line something silvery broke the surface in a cloud of spray. It was a torpedo that had run its course and had missed the mark. Simultaneously, one of the escorting destroyers, a mile abeam, turned like a mongoose on a snake, and circled questing for a couple of minutes. Then suddenly a column of water leaped into the air astern of the destroyer, and the sound of the explosion was engulfed by the great loneliness of sea and sky. She remained circling while the battle fleet swept on with swift, bewildering alterations of course, and later another far-off explosion overtook them.

“Strong smell of oil; air bubbles. No wreckage visible. Consider enemy submarine sunk. No survivors,” blinked the laconic searchlight, and the avenger, belching smoke from four raking funnels, came racing up to her appointed station.

As the afternoon wore on, a neutral passenger ship crossed the path of the fleet. She was steering a westerly course, and altered to pass astern of the battle cruisers.

The captain wiped his glasses and handed them to one of the passengers, an amiable merchant of the same nationality as himself, and a self-confessed admirer of all things British.

“Ha!” said the captain. “You see? The clenched fist of Britain! It is being pushed under the nose of Germany—so!” He laughingly extended a gnarled fist in the other’s face. The merchant was a frequent passenger of his, and the sort of man (by reason of his aforesaid proclivities) to appreciate the jest. The merchant stepped back a pace rather hurriedly: then he laughed loudly. “Exactly!” he said, “very neat, my friend.” And borrowing his friend’s glasses he studied the far-off tendrils of smoke in silence awhile.

A quarter of an hour later, a light cruiser altered course from the fleet in the direction of the neutral steamer. Then it was that the amiable merchant was struck by a sudden recollection. It was a matter of considerable urgency and concerned an order for a large number of bolts of calico and a customer’s credit. So pressing was the business that he obtained the captain’s permission to send a radio telegram to his firm while the approaching cruiser was still some miles away.

The message was duly dispatched, and, with surprising rapidity, by methods with which this narrative is not concerned (of which, indeed, the narrator is entirely ignorant), reached Wilhelmshaven by nightfall. Here four German battle cruisers were raising steam preparatory to carrying out a bombardment at dawn of a populous English watering-place. The message that reached them had, however, nothing to do with calico or credit, but it bade them draw fires and give the usual leave to officers and men; orders for the bombardment were cancelled. The German battle cruisers were not unaccustomed to rapid changes of programme of this sort, and they asked no questions.

At nine o’clock the following morning, a British taxpayer sat down to breakfast in a house commanding a fine view of the sea from the popular watering-place already mentioned. It was a large house, and incidentally offered an admirable target from the sea. The taxpayer unfolded his morning paper, and took a sip of his tea. Then he put the cup down quickly. “You’ve forgotten the sugar,” he said.

“No, dear,” replied his wife, “I haven’t forgotten it, but there isn’t any.”

“Eh,” said the taxpayer, “why not? why the devil isn’t there any sugar?”

The taxpayer’s wife advanced a number of popular theories to account for the phenomenon, while the taxpayer gloomily stirred his unsweetened tea.

“Then all I should like to know,” he replied, when she had finished, “is, what the blazes is our Navy doing?”

“I don’t know, dear,” said the taxpayer’s wife.

II. A Striking Force

Daybreak, drawing back the dark shroud of night from the face of the North Sea, disclosed a British minelaying submarine making her way homeward on the surface. To the two oilskin-clad figures on the conning tower, chilled and streaming wet in the cheerless dawn, it also betrayed feathers of smoke above the horizon astern. The submarine promptly dived to investigate at closer quarters, and was rewarded by the spectacle of a German cruiser squadron, screened by destroyers, steering a northwesterly course at high speed.

The submarine did not attempt to attack with her torpedoes. She retired instead to where the sand-fog stirs in an endless groundswell, and the North Sea cod hover about the wrecks of neutral merchantmen. In these unlit depths she lay for an hour, listening to the chunk of many propellers pass overhead and die away. She knew nothing of the mysterious chain of events which sent those cruisers venturing beyond the protection of the far-reaching German minefields. She was as ignorant of popular clamour in Germany for spectacular naval activity as she was of the presence of a large convoy of laden freighters a hundred miles away to the northward, escorted by destroyers and making for a British port. These matters were not her “pidgin.” On the other hand, having once sighted the German cruisers, she became very much concerned with getting the information through to quarters where it would be appreciated. Accordingly, when the last of the water-borne sounds ceased, the submarine rose to the surface, projected a tiny wireless mast above the wave-tops, and sent out the Call rippling through space.

It was addressed to a certain light cruiser squadron, lying at its buoys with the needles of the pressure gauges flickering and the shells fused in the racks beside each gun, waiting day and night in much the tense preparedness with which the fire brigade waits.

Within two hours the light cruisers were out, ribands of foam and smoke unreeling astern of them, with their attendant destroyers bucketing and plunging on either side of them, flinging the spray abroad in the greeting of a steep easterly swell. The last destroyer swung into station ere the line of minesweepers, crawling patiently to and fro about the harbour approaches, were blotted from view in their smoke astern. Presently the harbour itself faded out of sight; in lodging, cottage, and villa the women glanced at the clocks as the ships went out, and then turned to their morning tasks and the counting of the slow hours....

East into the sunlight went the slim grey cruisers, and then north, threading their swift way through the half-known menace of the minefields, altering course from time to time to give a wide berth to the horned Death that floated awash among the waves. At intervals the yard-arm of the leading light cruiser would be flecked with colour as a signal bellied out against the wind, and each time speed was increased. Faster and faster they rushed through the yellowish seas, fans and turbines humming their song of speed, and the wind in the shrouds chiming in on a higher note as if from an æolian harp.

The spray rattled like hail against the sloping gun-shields and splinter-mats, behind which men stood huddled in little clusters or leaned peering ahead through glasses; cinders from the smoke of the next ahead collected in little whorls and eddies or crunched underfoot about the decks; the guns’ crews jested among themselves in low voices, while the sight-setters adjusted their head-pieces and the layer of each slim gun fussed lovingly about the glittering breech mechanism with a handful of waste....

Then suddenly, above the thunder of the waves and singing of the wind, a clear hail floated aft from a look-out. Bare feet thudded on the planking of the signal bridge, bunting whirled amid the funnel smoke, and the hum of men’s voices along the stripped decks deepened into a growl.

“Smoke on the port bow!”

A daylight searchlight chattered suspiciously—paused—flashed a blinding question, and was silent.

Orders droned down the voice-pipes. Somewhere a man laughed—a sudden savage laugh of exultation, that broke a tension none were aware of till that moment. Then a fire-gong jarred: the muzzle of the foremost gun suddenly vomited a spurt of flame, and as the wind whipped the yellow smoke into tatters, the remaining light cruisers opened fire.

Bang!... bang!... bang!... bang!... bang!

On the misty horizon there were answering flashes, and a moment later came a succession of sounds as of a child beating a tray. The light cruisers wheeled to the eastward amid scattered columns of foam from falling shells, and as they turned to cut off the enemy from his base the destroyers went past, their bows buried in spray, smoke swallowing the frayed white ensigns fluttering aft. In a minute they had vanished in smoke, out of which guns spat viciously, leaving a tangle of little creaming wakes to mark the path of their headlong onslaught.

Neck and neck raced the retreating raiders and the avenging Nemesis from the east coast of Britain. Ahead lay the German minefields and German submarines and the tardy support of the German High Seas Fleet. Somewhere far astern a huddle of nervous merchantmen were being hustled westward by their escort, and midway between the two the hostile destroyer flotillas fought in a desperate death-grapple under the misty blue sky.

When at length the British light cruisers hauled off and ceased fire on the fringe of the German minefields, the enemy were hull down over the horizon, leaving two destroyers sinking amid a swirl of oil and wreckage, and a cruiser on her beam ends ablaze from bow to stern. The sea was dotted with specks of forlorn humanity clinging to spars and rafts. Boats from the British destroyers plied to and fro among them, bent on the quixotic old-fashioned task of succouring a beaten foe. Those not actively engaged in this work of mercy circled round at high speed to fend off submarine attack; the light cruisers stayed by to discourage the advances of a pair of Zeppelins which arrived from the eastward in time to drop bombs on the would-be rescuers of their gasping countrymen.

The bowman of a destroyer’s whaler disengaged his boathook from the garments of a water-logged Teuton, grasped his late enemy by the collar and hauled him spluttering into the boat with a single powerful heave of his right arm.

All about them cutters and whalers rising and falling on the swell were quickly being laden to the gunwales with scalded, bleeding, half-drowned prisoners. A midshipman in the stern of a cutter was waving a bedraggled German ensign and half-tearfully entreating his crew to stop gaping at the Zeppelins and attend to orders. The barking of the light cruisers’ high-angle guns was punctuated by the whinny of falling bombs and pieces of shrapnel that whipped the surface of the sea into spurts of foam. In the background the sinking cruiser blazed sullenly, the shells in her magazine exploding like gigantic Chinese crackers.

In the bows of the whaler referred to above the able seaman with the boathook sat regarding the captive of his bow and spear (or rather, boathook). “’Ere, Tirpitz!” he said, and removing his cap he produced the stump of a partly smoked cigarette. The captive took it with a watery smile and pawed his rescuer’s trousers.

“Kamarad!” he said.

“Not ’arf!” said his captor appreciatively. “Not ’arf you ain’t, you—— —— son of a—— ——!”

The second bow, labouring at his oar, looked back over his shoulder.

“’Ush!” he said reprovingly. “’E can’t understand. Wot’s the use o’ wastin’ that on ’im?” He spat contemptuously over the gunwale.

. . . . .

The following thoughtful description of the action appeared in the German wireless communiqué next morning:

“Our light forces in an enterprise off the English coast put to flight a vastly superior strength of armed merchant cruisers escorted by destroyers. English fleet on coming to the rescue was compelled to withdraw, and our forces returned to harbour without further molestation.”

Every man to his own trade.

III. The Left Flank

The north-east wind carried the steady grumble of gunfire across the sand-dunes and far out to sea.

The foremost gun’s crew of a British destroyer stood huddled in the lee of the gun-shield with their duffle hoods pulled down over their foreheads. The sea was calm, and the stars overhead shone with frosty brilliance. A figure groped its way forward with a bowl of cocoa, and joined the group round the breech of the gun. They drank in turn, grunting as the warmth penetrated into their interiors.

The distant gunfire swelled momentarily. Above the horizon far ahead intermittent gleams marked the activity of searchlight and star-shell.

“Them’s our guns,” said one of the cocoa-drinkers. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat, and stared ahead. It never seemed to occur to any of them that they might equally well be German guns.

“That’s right,” confirmed the sight-setter. “There’s guns going like that for ’undreds an’ ’undreds of miles. Right away up from the sea. Me brother’s there—somewhere....” For a moment they ruminated over a mental picture of the sight-setter’s brother, a mud-plastered stoical atom, somewhere along those hundreds of miles of wire and bayonets that hedged civilisation and posterity from the Unnamable. “Switzerland to the sea,” said the speaker. He jerked the breech-lever absent-mindedly towards him, and closed it again with a little click.

“An’ then we takes on,” said a loading number. “Us an’ these ’ere.” He tapped the smooth side of a lyddite shell lying in the rack beside him.

“An’ this ’ere,” said the man who had brought the cocoa. He thrust forward the cumbersome hilt of a cutlass at his hip. The starlight gleamed dully on the steel guard.

“You won’t use that to-night, my son,” said the gunlayer. “We ain’t goin’ to ’ave no Broke an’ Swift song an’ dance to-night.” He stared out into the clear darkness. “We couldn’t never git near enough.” Nevertheless, he put out his hand in the gloom and reassured himself of the safety of a formidable bar of iron well within reach. Once in the annals of this war had a British destroyer come to grips at close quarters with the enemy; thereafter her crew walked the earth as men apart, and the darlings of the high gods.

The night grew suddenly darker. It was the mysterious hour that precedes the dawn, when warring men and sleeping animals stir and bethink them of the morrow. The destroyer slackened speed and turned, the wide circle of her wake shimmering against the darkness of the water. As they turned, other dark shapes were visible abeam, moving at measured distance from each other without a light showing or a sound but the faint swish of the water past their sides. The flotilla had reached the limit of its beat, and swung round to resume the unending patrol.

Once from the starry sky came the drone of a seaplane moving up from its base that lay to the southward. Another followed, another and another, skirting the coast and flying well out to sea to avoid the searchlights and anti-aircraft guns of the shore batteries. They passed invisible, and the drone of their engines died away.

“Our spottin’ machines,” said the sight-setter. “They’re going up to spot for the monitors at daylight.” He jerked his head astern to the north, and yawned. “I reckon I’d sooner ’ave this job than screenin’ monitors wot’s bombardin’ Ostend. I don’t fancy them 15-inch German shell droppin’ round out o’ nuffink, an’ no chance of ’ittin’ back.”

“They knocks seven-bells outer Ostend, them monitors,” said another. “We ain’t knockin’ ’ell out o’ nobody, steamin’ up an’ down like one of them women slops in the ’Orseferry Road.” The speaker blinked towards the east where the stars were paling.

“We’re all doin’ our bit,” said the gunlayer, “an’ one o’ these nights....” He shook his head darkly. The dawn crept into the sky: the faces beneath the duffle hoods grew discernible to each other, unshaven, pink-lidded, pinched with cold. Objects, shining with frozen dew, took form out of the black void. The outline of the bridge above them, and the mast behind, stood out against the sky; the head and shoulders of the captain, with his glasses to his eyes, appeared above the bridge screen, where he had been all night, watchful and invisible. The smoke trailing astern blotted out the rest of the flotilla following in each other’s wake. Aft along the deck, guns’ and torpedo-tubes’ crews began to move and stamp their feet for warmth.

Away to starboard a circular object nearly awash loomed up and dropped astern. Another appeared a few minutes later, and was succeeded by a third. Mile after mile these dark shapes slid past, stretching away to the horizon. They were the buoys of the Channel barrage, supporting the mined nets which are but a continuation of four hundred miles of barbed wire.

The day dawned silvery grey and disclosed a diffused activity upon the face of the waters. Two great hospital ships, screened by destroyers as a sinister reminder to the beholder of Germany’s forfeited honour, slid away swiftly towards the French coast. A ragged line of coastwise traffic, barges under sail, lighters in tow of tugs, and deepladen freighters hugging the swept channel along the coast, appeared as if by magic out of “the bowl of night”; from the direction of the chalk-cliffs came a division of drifters in line ahead. They passed close to the destroyers, and the figure on the leading destroyer’s bridge bawled through a megaphone. They were curt incoherencies to a landsman—vague references to a number and some compass bearings. A big man on board the drifter flagship waved his arm to indicate he understood the message; which was to the effect that one of the barrage buoys appeared to have dragged a little, and the net looked as if it was worth examining.

The drifters spread out along the line of buoys and commenced their daily task of overhauling the steel jackstays, testing the circuits of the mines, repairing damage caused by the ebb and flow of the tide and winter gales.

Half an hour later the destroyers encountered their reliefs, transferred the mantle of responsibility for the left flank with a flutter of bunting and a pair of hand-flags, and returned to their anchorage, where they were greeted by a peremptory order from the signal station to complete with oil fuel and report when ready for sea again. A coastal airship had reported an enemy submarine in the closely guarded waters of the Channel, and along sixty miles of watchful coast the hunt was up.

“My brother Alf,” said the sight-setter disgustedly, as he kicked off his seaboots and prepared for an hour’s sleep, “’e may be famil’r wif tools wot I don’t know nothin’ about. But there’s one thing about ’em—when ’e lays ’em down, ’e bloody-well lays ’em down.”

IV. The Hunt

The Blimp rose from her moorings, soaring seaward, and straightway the roar of her propeller cut off each of the occupants of the car into a separate world of his own silence. The aerodrome with its orderly row of hangars dropped away from under them with incredible swiftness. Fields became patchwork, buildings fell into squares and lozenges without identity. Figures which a minute or two before had been noisy, muscular, perspiring fellow-men working on the ropes, were dots without motion or meaning, and faded to nothingness.

A flock of seagulls rose from the face of the cliff, whirled beneath them like autumn leaves, and dropped astern. The parallel lines of white that were breakers chasing each other to ruin on a rock-bound coast merged into the level floor of the Atlantic, and presently there was nothing but sea and blue sky with the rushing wind between, and this glittering triumph of man’s handiwork held suspended like a bauble midway.

The pilot turned in his seat and grinned over his shoulder at the observer. The grin was the only visible portion of his face: the rest was hidden by flying-helmet and goggles and worsted muffler. The grin said: “It’s a fine morning and the old bus is running like a witch. What’s the odds on sighting a Fritz?”

The observer laughed and shouted an inaudible reply against the roar of the wind. He pulled a slip of chewing gum out of his pocket, bit off a piece, and passed the rest to the pilot. Then he adjusted the focus of the high-power glasses and began methodically quartering out the immense circular expanse of sea beneath them.

Half an hour had passed when the wireless operator in the rear leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder. His listeners were to his ears, and he was scribbling something on a slate. “S.O.S.—S.O.S.”—a bearing from a distant headland—“fourteen miles—S.O.S.—S.O.S.—come quickly—I am being shelled—S.O.S.—Subma——” The operator paused with his pencil above the slate, waited a moment, and handed the slate forward.

The message, soundless, appealing, that had reached them out of the blue immensity had ceased abruptly. The pilot glanced from the compass to a small square of chart clamped before him, and slowly turned the wheel. Then he looked back over his shoulder and grinned again.

A quarter of an hour later the pilot extended a gauntletted hand and pointed to the rim of the horizon. A faint smudge of smoke darkened into a trailing cloud, and presently they saw ahead of it the forepart of a ship, driving through the water at a speed which clove a white, irregular furrow across the surface of the sea. She was swerving from side to side like a hunted buck, and as the dirigible dipped her nose and the hum of the wind redoubled to a roar in the ears of the crew, they saw away to the west a tiny cigar-shaped object. At intervals a spurt of flame shot from it, and a little pale mushroom-shaped cloud appeared above the steamer as the shrapnel burst.

The Blimp swooped at eighty miles an hour upon that cigar-shaped object. The observer braced his feet and grasped the bomb release lever, his jaws still moving about the piece of chewing-gum. The sea, flecked with little waves, rushed up to greet them. They had a glimpse of the submarine’s crew tumbling pell-mell for the conning-tower hatchway, of the wicked gun abandoned forward still trained on the fleeing merchantman. The next instant the quarry had shot beneath them. A sharp concussion of the air beat upon the fragile car and body of the airship as her nose was flung up and round. The dirigible’s bomb had burst right forward on the pointed bows, and the submarine was diving in a confused circle of broken water and spray.

The Blimp turned to drop another bomb ahead of the rapidly vanishing wake, and then marked the spot with a calcium flare, while the wireless operator jiggled a far-flung “Tally ho!” on the sending-key of his apparatus.

The tramp disappeared below the horizon, and they caught disjointed scraps of her breathless tale while they circled in wide spirals above the watery arena.

Three motor launches were the first upon the scene, each with a slim gun in the bows, and carrying, like hornets, a sting in their tails. They were old hands at the game, and they spread out on the hunt with business-like deliberation under the directions of the Blimp’s Morse lamp. The captain of the inshore boat (he had been a stockbroker in an existence several æons gone by) traced a tar-stained finger across the chart, and glanced again at the compass. “Nets—nets—nets,” he mumbled. “The swine probably knows about those to the northwest ... He daren’t go blind much longer. Ha!”

“Feather three points on your port bow,” winked the Blimp. Over went the motor launch’s helm, and the seaward boat suddenly darted ahead in a white cloud of spray. Bang! a puff of smoke drifted away from the wet muzzle of her gun; half a mile ahead a ricochet flung up a column of foam as the shell went sobbing and whimpering into the blue distance.

“Periscope dipped,” waved a pair of hand-flags from the boat that had fired. And a moment later, “Keep out of my wake! Am going to release a charge.”

For an hour that relentless blindfold hunt went forward, punctuated by exploding bombs and depth charges, and the crack of the launches’ guns as the periscope of the submarine rose for an instant’s glimpse of his assailants and vanished again. Twice the enemy essayed a torpedo counter-attack, and each time the trail passed wide. Then, crippled and desperate, he doubled on his tracks, and for a while succeeded in shaking off the pursuit. Nets, as he knew, lay ahead, and nets were death; safety lay to the southward could he but keep submerged; but the water, spurting through the buckled plating and rivets started by the bursting depth charges, had mingled with the acid in the batteries and generated poison gas, which drove him to the surface. Here he turned, a couple of miles astern of his pursuers, and manned both guns, a hunted vermin at bay. As his foremost gun opened fire, a heavy shell burst a few yards abeam of the submarine, and the captain of the nearest motor launch raised his glasses. It was not a shell fired from a motor launch.

“The destroyers,” he said. “Now why couldn’t they have kept away till we’d made a job of it?” On the horizon the masts and funnels of a flotilla of destroyers appeared in line abreast, approaching at full speed, firing as they came. The next instant a shell from the submarine burst on the tiny forecastle of the launch, shattering the gun, gun’s crew, and wheelhouse. The coxswain dropped over the wrecked wheel and slowly slid to the deck like a marionette suddenly deprived of animation. The lieutenant R.N.V.R. who had once been a stockbroker stood upright for an instant with his hands to his throat as if trying to stem the red torrent spurting through his fingers, and then pitched brokenly beside the coxswain.

The captain of the submarine counted the approaching destroyers, opened the seacock to speed the flooding of his doomed craft, gave a swift glance overhead at the Blimp swooping towards them for the coup-de-grâce, and ordered Cease Fire. Then he waved his hands in token of surrender.

V. Overdue

The thin light of a sickle moon tipped the crest of each swift-running sea with silver. The rest was a purple blackness, through which the north wind slashed like a knife, and the sound of surf on a distant shoal was carried moaning. At intervals a bank of racing clouds trailed across the face of the moon, and then all was inky dark for a while.

It was during one of these periods of obliteration of all things visible that a slender, perpendicular object rose above the surface of the sea. Gradually the dim light waxed again: a wave, cloven in its path, passed hissing on either side in a trail of spray, and the object slowly projected until it topped the highest wave. Presently about its base a convulsive disturbance in the water was followed by the appearance of a conical shape, a solid blackness against the streaked glimmering obscurity of the water breaking all about its sides and streaming in cascades from the flat railed-in top. A hatchway opened, and two figures crawled out, clinging to the rail of their swaying foothold while the full force of the wind clawed and battered at their forms. They maintained a terse conversation by dint of shouting in turn with their lips to each other’s ears, while the conning-tower of the submarine on which they stood moved forward in the teeth of the elements.

For half an hour they went plunging and lurching onwards, clinging with numbed hands to the rail as a green sea swept about their legs, wiping the half-frozen spray from their eyes to search the darkness ahead with night-glasses. Then one pointed away on the bow.

“How’s that?” he bawled. A point on the bow something dark tumbled amid the waves and flying spindrift. The other stared a moment, shouted an order to the invisible helmsman through a voice-pipe, and the wind that had hitherto been in their streaming eyes smote and buffeted them on the left cheek. A scurry of sleet whirled momentarily about them, blotting out the half-glimpsed buoy; the taller of the two figures put out an arm and smote his companion on the back. They had made that buoy at dawn the previous day, and then, according to the custom of British submarines in enemy waters, submerged till nightfall. Now, despite the set of the tides and currents and the darkness, they had found it again, and with it their bearings for the desperate journey that lay ahead.

For two hours they groped their way onwards through what would have been unfathomable mysteries to a landsman. Compass, chart, and leadline played their part: but not even these, coupled with the stoutest heart that ever beat, avail against unknown minefield and watchful patrols. Thrice the two alert, oilskin-clothed figures dived through the hatchway into the interior of the submarine, and the platform on which they had been standing vanished eerily beneath the surface as a string of long, dark shapes went by with a throb of unseen propellers. Once when thus submerged an unknown object grated past the thin shell with a harsh metallic jar, and passed astern in silence. Then it was that the captain of the submarine removed his cap, passing his sleeve quickly across his damp forehead, and the gesture was doubtless accepted where all prayers of gratitude find their way.

The first gleam of dawn, however, found no submarine on the surface. It showed a business-like flotilla of destroyers on their beat, and a long line of net drifters at anchor in the far distance amid sandbanks. An armed trawler with rust-streaked sides and a gun forward was making her way through the cold, grey seas in the direction of the drifters; a hoist of gay-coloured signal flags flew from her stump of a mast, and at the peak a tattered German ensign. The crew were clustered for warmth in the lee of the engine-room casing, their collars turned up above their ears, and their hands deep in their pockets. They were staring ahead intently at the line of nets guarding the entrance to the harbour they were about to enter. None noticed a black speck that peeped intermittently out of their tumbling wake thirty yards astern, and followed them up the channel. Three or four fathoms beneath that questioning speck, in an electric-lit glittering steel cylinder, a young man stood peering into the lens of a high-power periscope, both hands resting on a lever. He spoke in a dull monotone, with long intervals of silence; and throughout the length of that cylinder, beside valve and dial and lever, a score of pairs of eyes watched him steadfastly.

“She’s given her funnel a coat of paint since last month ... port ten—steady! steady!... There’s the gate vessel moving.... The skipper is waving to hurry him up.... Wants his breakfast, I suppose.... That must be the big crane in the dockyard.... There are flags hung about everywhere.... Starboard a touch.... It’s getting devilish light.... There’s something that looks like a battle-cruiser alongside....”

There was a long silence, then the figure manipulating the periscope suddenly stood upright.

“We’re through,” he said quietly. “And that’s their new battle-cruiser.”

. . . . .

In the smoking-room of a British submarine depot a group of officers sat round the fire. Now and again one or other made a trivial observation from behind his newspaper; occasionally one would glance swiftly at the clock and back to his paper as if half afraid the glance would be intercepted. The hands of the clock crept slowly round to noon; the clock gave a little preliminary whirr and then struck the hour.

“Eight bells,” said the youngest of the group in a tone of detachment, as if the hour had no special significance. A grave-faced lieutenant-commander seated nearest the door rose slowly to his feet and buttoned up his monkey jacket.

“You goin’, Bill?” asked his neighbour in a low voice.

The upright figure nodded. “He’d have done as much for me,” he replied, and walked quickly out of the room.

No one spoke for some minutes. Then the youngest member lowered the magazine he was holding in front of him.

“Do they cry?” he asked.

“No,” said two voices simultaneously. “’Least,” added one, “not at the time.”

The silence settled down again like dust that had been disturbed; then the first speaker leaned forward and tapped the ashes out of his pipe.

“Well,” he observed, “they didn’t get him cheap, at all events. I’m open to a bet that he sent a Boche or two ahead of him to pipe the side.”

The group nodded a grim assent.

“Yes,” said one who had not hitherto spoken. “I reckon you’re right. But we shan’t hear till the war’s over. They know how to keep their own secrets.” He puffed at his pipe reflectively.

“Anyhow, thank God I’m a bachelor,” he concluded. He lifted a fox-terrier’s head between his hands and shook it gently to and fro. “No one need go and tell our wives if we don’t come back—eh, little Blinks?” The dog yawned, gave the hands that held him a perfunctory lick, and resumed his interrupted nap sprawling across his master’s knees.

. . . . .

Among the letters intercepted shortly afterwards on their way to a South American State from Germany was one that contained the following significant passage:

“ ... Yesterday all Kiel was beflagged: we were to have had a half-holiday on the occasion of the trials of the great new battle cruiser——. Owing to an unforeseen incident, however, the trials were not completed. Our half-holiday has been postponed indefinitely....”

VI. “Tuppence Apiece”

The herring were in the bay, and the fleet of sailing smacks went trailing out on the light wind with their eager crews of old men and boys straining at the halliards to catch the last capful of wind. After them came the armed guard-boat of the little peaceful fleet, a stout trawler with a gun in her bows, fussing in the wake of her charges.

The skipper of the guard-boat was at the wheel, a tall, gaunt old man with a fringe of grey whisker round his jaws and a mouth as tight as a scar. He it was who located the herring and placed the fleet across their path, and all that day the smacks lay to their nets till the porpoises turned inshore and drove the silvery host eastward. After them went the smacks, with holds half-full, lured on by the promise of two quarters’ rent as good as paid. Finally, the old Trawler Reserveman checked the pursuit.

“Fish or no fish,” he cried. “Here ye

bide the night.” They had reached the limit of the safety zone in those waters, and he rounded up his flock like a sagacious sheep-dog, counting the little craft carefully ere he took up his position to seaward of them for the night. At the first hint of dawn he weighed anchor and counted again: his grim old face darkened. He turned to seaward where the sky was lightening fast, and searched the mist through glasses. Three smacks were discernible some miles outside their allotted area. The burly mate stood beside his father, and watched the delinquents hauling in their nets with a speed that hinted at an uneasy conscience.

“They’m drifted in a bit of a tide rip, mebbe?” he ventured.

The old man growled an oath. “Tide rip? Nay! They’m just daft wi’ greed. There’s no wit nor dacency in their sodden heads. An’ I’ll larn ’em both. By God I’ll larn ’em to disobey my orders.” ... He watched the far-off craft hoisting sail, with eyes grey and cold as flints beneath the bushy brows. “Aye,” he said threateningly, “I’ll larn ye ...” and clumped forward to the wheel-house.

The sun had not yet risen, and the thin morning mists wreathed the face of the waters. As the trawler gathered way a sudden flash of light blinked out of the mist to the northward. The report of a gun was followed by the explosion of a shell fifty yards on the near side of the most distant fishing-smack.

The trawler skipper measured the distance from the flash to the fishing fleet, and thence to the truants bowling towards them on the morning breeze.

“Man the gun!” he roared. “Action Stations, lads!” He picked up a megaphone and bellowed through it in the direction of his charges: “Cut your warps an’ get ter hell outer this!” Then he wrenched the telegraph to full speed and put the wheel over, heading his little craft towards the quarter from which the flash had come. The gun’s crew closed up round the loaded gun, rolling up their sleeves and spitting on their hands as is the custom of their breed before a fight.

“There’s a submarine yonder in the mist,” shouted the skipper. “Open fire directly ye sight her and keep her busy while the smacks get away.” Astern of them the small craft were cutting their nets away and hoisting sail. Three or four were already making for safety to the westward before the early morning breeze that hurried in catspaws over the sea.

Bang!

The trawler opened fire as the submarine appeared ahead like a long, hump-backed shadow against the pearly grey of the horizon. The breech clanged open and the acrid smoke floated aft as they reloaded.

“Rapid fire!” shouted the skipper. Shells were bursting all about the fleeing smacks. “Give ’em hell, lads. Her’ve got two guns an’ us but the one....” He glanced back over his shoulder at the little craft he was trying to save, and then bent to the voice-pipe. “Every ounce o’ steam, Luther. Her’ll try to haul off an’ outrange my little small gun.”

Smoke poured from the gaily-painted funnel; the “little small gun” barked and barked again, and one after the other the empty cylinders went clattering into the scuppers. A shell struck the trawler somewhere in the region of the mizzen mast, and sent the splinters flying. A minute later another exploded off the port bow, flinging the water in sheets over the gun’s crew. The sight-setter slid into a sitting position, his back against the pedestal of the gun-mounting, and his head lolling on his shoulder. They had drawn the enemy’s fire at last, and every minute gave the smacks a better chance. Shell after shell struck the little craft as she blundered gallantly on. The stern was alight: the splintered foremast lay across a funnel riddled like a pepper-pot. The trawler’s boy—a shock-headed child of fourteen who had been passing up ammunition to the gun—leaned whimpering against the engine-room casing, nursing a blood-sodden jacket wrapped about his forearm.

The mate was at the gun, round which three of the crew lay. One had raised himself on his elbow and was coughing out his soul. The other two were on their backs staring at the sky.

In the face of the trawler’s fire, the submarine turned and drew out of range, firing as she went. One of the British shells had struck the low-lying hull in the stern, and a thin cloud of grey smoke ascended from the rent. Figures were visible running aft along the railed-in deck, gesticulating.

“Ye’ve hit her,” shouted the skipper from the wheel. “Give ’em hell, lads——”

A sudden burst of flame and smoke enveloped the wheel-house, and the skipper went hurtling through the doorway and pitched with a thud on the deck.

The mate ran aft and knelt beside him. “Father,” he cried hoarsely.

The inert blue-clad figure raised himself on his hands, and his head swayed between his massive shoulders.

“Father,” said the mate again, and shook him, as if trying to awaken someone from sleep. “Be ye hurted terrible bad?”

The grim old seadog raised his head, and his son saw that he was blind.

“Pitch the codes overboard,” he said. “I’m blind an’ stone deaf, an’ my guts are all abroad under me, but ye’ll fight the little gun while there’s a shell left aboard....”

The mate stood up and looked aft along the splintered, bloody deck, beyond the smoke and steam trailing to leeward.

“The gun’s wrecked,” he said slowly, as if speaking to himself. “The little smacks are clear o’ danger.... The destroyers are comin’ up.... Ye have fought a good fight, father.” The submarine had ceased fire, and as he spoke, she submerged and vanished sullenly, like a wild beast baulked of its prey.

. . . . .

An old woman sat knitting beside the fire in the heart of a Midland town next day. The door opened and a girl came in quickly, with a shawl over her head and a basket on her arm.

“There’s a surprise for supper,” she said.

The old woman looked inside the basket. “Herrin’!” she said. “What did they cost?”

“Tuppence apiece,” replied the girl lightly, as she hung up her shawl.