Navy is his father and his mother and his only Aunt Jemima; go out with him when he is in charge of a cutter; listen to him in the workshop; in the flats forward; between the pauses of practice-firing, or up on the booms taking stock of the boats, and you will concede that he is a superior and an adequate person.
‘Yes, I suppose it’s all very nice,’ said one of them, while I applauded and admired some manœuvre that he did not trouble to raise an eyelid for, ‘but just think what we could do if we had the men all together for three years steady! As it is, we’re practically a Training Squadron. When we get back to Plymouth they’ll snatch a hundred of our best men an’ turn ’em over to the Mediterranean, and we’ll have to take up a lot of new ones. The Mediterranean have got the better trained men, but they haven’t our chances of working together.’
‘But the men are trained when you get ’em, surely?’
‘Yes; but you get the same lot in one ship all through her commission, and you put a polish on ’em.’
‘P.Q. 2,’ cried a signalman. That was a well-known message. It meant: ‘Get into your boats as fast as you know how and pull round the Fleet.’ The men leaped on to the nettings and fell outboard like dolphins.
‘That shows it,’ said the Warrant Officer with a sniff. ‘Look at that man crawlin’ into his place’ (to me he seemed to be flying). ‘Our first boat ought to be away in fifteen seconds’ (it was quite thirty before the last drew clear). ‘There go the Arrogants.’ His face darkened. Was it possible that that tip-tilted, hog-backed cruiser had——
‘We’re well first away,’ said a Lieutenant.
‘Hum! We ought to have been more previous,’ said the Warrant Officer. ‘The Arrogants nearly beat us. We love the Arrogant, but we do not allow her to lead if we can help it.’
A Tale Worth Telling
Another time we were not so lucky. The tale is worth telling to show (a) how one is at the mercy of one’s subordinates, and (b) how there is no excuse in the Navy. At odd hours, chiefly in the black night, the Admiral, feeling lonely, calls up one boat from each ship to his gangway, and the signal, which we will label T.V.K., reads: ‘Cutter to Flagship from each ship; third-class cruisers to send whaler.’ Warned by experience, the First Lieutenant, whom it is not easy to catch napping, had the whaler’s crew sleeping all handy by, where one order would send them out like fly-stung cattle. A cutter requires about three times as many men, and on a small cruiser one cannot keep these together. Enter, then, at 11:45 p.m., a zealous signalman with the words: ‘Cutter to the Flagship.’ In his haste he had omitted to read the conclusion of the signal vouchsafing us the whaler, and (this was his black error) told no one that it was ‘T.V.K.,’ which would have explained the situation. No, he needs must say ‘cutter’; so cutter it was. After the men had been variously dug out of their hammocks and the heavy boat got away, the Flagship wanted to know why we were several scandalous minutes behind our time. It was a direct reflection on the ship and its smartness; a galling and unanswerable wigging that makes men dance and swear with rage. We could only have said that the signal was misread, which would not have helped us in the least; so we shut our mouths and killed the signalman next morning. His own chief, the hawk-nosed Yeoman of Signals, flung him bound to the executioner, saying: ‘He ought to have known, sir; he ought to have known.’ So he was boiled, scraped, and sand-papered, his hair was cut and his number was taken; after which he went forward and heard precisely what the lower deck thought of him. Then a visiting Captain’s galley hanging on to the gangway rubbed it in gracefully and casually, and a fat beef-boat condoled with us ironically, and the whaler (see Note V.) heard all about it next time she went sailing without an officer in the stern-sheets. It was most annoying, but can’t you see how easily this sort of accident may happen?
Chapter VI
I had the honour of dining on the Flagship next night, and so contagious is the naval spirit that I went there, as it were, annoyed and uneasy over the matter of the misread signal. One cannot regard an Admiral in the exercise of his duty as a mere human. It is in his power to make you get up an anchor by hand if he thinks you are slack; he can stop your coaling and bid you man and arm boats in the middle of the grimy mess; he can make you repeat a certain business till you are sick and dizzy; or he can raise you to high honour by signalling: ‘Well done, So-and-so. Evolution creditably performed.’ He blocks up all the horizon when he appears on it. At six miles off, across the windy blue, the spirit may move him to chat with you, and if your best signalman have not his best telescope at his best eye, and the Admiral be forced to repeat his remarks, you will hear about it at closer range.
The Isolation of an Admiral
The loneliness of a Captain is society beside the isolation of an Admiral. He goes up on the after-bridge, and moves some £10,000,000 worth of iron and steel at his pleasure. No man can stop him, few dare even suggest. Then comes the sea, as it did round the Orkneys, and a little roaring ‘roost’ marked with a few hair-lines on the chart—a tide-rip racing between ledges—buffets his stately galleons, and drives them lightly out of all formation. One never connects a clergyman with St. Paul; but one cannot look at an Admiral without speculating on our apostolic Succession of the Sea. With these powers were clothed Nelson and the rest—‘Admirals all.’ And this particular piece of flesh and blood is of the same order, and rank, and breed, and responsibility—the Admiral in command of the Channel Fleet. And now it is peace. (‘Yes, I have enjoyed my visit very much, thank you, sir.’) But if War came to-morrow? What would he do? How would he think? What does he think about now? He would go up on the bridge with the Flag-Lieutenant, and the ships would be cleared for action. (‘No, I’ve never seen a Temperley transporter at work.’) And then—and then . . . .?
It was a strange dinner for one guest at least—with its flowers and crystal and quiet conversation; the band playing on deck, and the lights of the Fleet twinkling all down the Bay.
There was a Prince in it who was also a Flag-Captain, and he set one thinking; and there were Commanders and Lieutenants in it, and it was all very pretty and gracious; but between me and the menu rose a vision of last year’s play-war—a battleship cleared for action, naked and grim, like a man swimming with a knife between his teeth—a wet and streaming hull thundering through heavy, rain-hammered seas.
Dinner in a Gun-room
‘Well, now you’ve done that,’ said Twenty-One, ‘suppose you come and dine in a Gun-room.’ (We have none on the cruiser, being all ward-room, with a cabin apiece.) ‘I’ll chaperon you to the best disciplined Gun-room in the Fleet. We’ll show you.’
So we went, Twenty-One and me, to another huge battleship, precisely like the Admiral’s; but this time Captains, Commanders, and Lieutenants were invisible, or showed only as superior luminaries far along the decks. We dealt with nothing above the rank of Sub-Lieutenant, and the greetings of that grade are cordial and warm. Down below—it was twice the size of our ward-room—we found their Gun-room, which differs in appointments and fittings from everything Marryat conceived, but I think the old unquenchable spirit persists. Of the twenty odd inhabitants, a dozen at least were Midshipmen, and therefore, as Twenty-One explained, ‘didn’t count.’ They talked among themselves in subdued eager whispers, dropping in to the meal as they came off duty. The senior Sub-Lieutenant (quite nineteen years old) was responsible for the justly vaunted discipline; and it is no small thing to reduce to silence boys of sixteen to eighteen, all full of natural and acquired deviltry. But it was done according to the custom of
