Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1140 page)

Patrols
II

The great basins were crammed with craft of kinds never known before on any Navy List. Some were as they were born, others had been converted, and a multitude have been designed for special cases. The Navy prepares against all contingencies by land, sea, and air. It was a relief to meet a batch of comprehensible destroyers and to drop again into the little mouse-trap wardrooms, which are as large hearted as all our oceans. The men one used to know as destroyer - lieutenants (‘born stealing’) are serious Commanders and Captains to-day, but their sons, Lieutenants in command and Lieutenant - Commanders, do follow them. The sea in peace is a hard life; war only sketches an extra line or two round the young mouths. The routine of ships always ready for action is so part of the blood now that no one notices any. thing except the absence of formality and of the ‘crimes’ of peace. What Warrant Officers used to say at length is cut down to a grunt. What the sailor-man did not know and expected to have told him, does not exist. He has done it all too often at sea and ashore.

I watched a little party working under a leading hand at a job which, eighteen months ago, would have required a Gunner in charge. It was comic to see his orders trying to overtake the execution of them. Ratings coming aboard carried themselves with a (to me) new swing, not swank, but consciousness of adequacy. The high, dark foc’sles which, thank goodness, are only washed twice a week, received them and their bags, and they turned-to on the instant as a man picks up his life at home. Like the submarine crew, they come to be a breed apart, double-jointed, extra. toed, with brazen bowels and no sort of nerves. It is the same in the engine-room, when the ships come in for their regular looking - over. Those who love them, which you would never guess from the language, know exactly what they need, and get it without fuss. Everything that steams has her individual peculiarity, and the great thing is, at overhaul, to keep to it and not develop a new one. If, for example, through some trick of her screws not synchronising, a destroyer always casts to port when she goes astern, do not let any zealous soul try to make her run true, or you will have to learn her helm all over again. And it is vital that you should know exactly what your ship is going to do three seconds before she does it. Similarly with men. If any one, from Lieutenant-Commander to stoker, changes his personal trick or habit, even the manner in which he clutches his chin or caresses his nose at a crisis, the matter must be carefully considered in this world where each is trustee for his neighbour’s life and, vastly more important, the corporate honour.

‘What are the destroyers doing just now?’ I asked. ‘Oh, running about, much the same as usual.’ The Navy hasn’t the least objection to telling one everything that it is doing. Unfortunately, it speaks its own language, which is incomprehensible to the civilian. But you will find it all in ‘The Channel Pilot’ and ‘The Riddle of the Sands’

It is a foul coast, hairy with currents and rips, and mottled with shoals and rocks. Practically the same men hold on here in the same ships, with much the same crews, for months and months. A most senior officer told me that they were ‘good boys’, on reflection, ‘quite good boys,’ but neither he nor the flags on his chart explained how they managed their lightless, unmarked navigations through black night, blinding rain, and the crazy, rebounding North Sea gales. They themselves ascribe it to Joss that they have not piled up their ships a hundred times.

‘I expect it must be because we’re always dodging about over the same ground. One gets to smell it. We’ve bumped pretty hard, of course, but we haven’t expended much up to date. You never know your luck on patrol, though.

The Nature of the Beast

Personally, though they have been true friends to me, I loathe destroyers, and all the raw, racking, ricochetting life that goes with them, the smell of the wet ‘lammies’ and damp wardroom cushions; the galley-chimney smoking out the bridge; the obstacle-strewn deck; and the pervading beastliness of oil, grit, and greasy iron. Even at moorings they shiver and sidle like half-backed horses. At sea they will neither rise up and fly clear like the hydroplanes, nor dive and be done with it like the submarines, but imitate the vices of both. A scientist of the lower deck describes them as:

‘Half switchback, half water - chute, and Hell continuous.’ Their only merit, from a landsman’s point of view, is that they can crumple themselves up from stem to bridge and (I have seen it) still get home. But one does not breathe these compliments to their commanders. Other destroyers may be, they will point them out to you, poisonous bags of tricks, but their own command ‘never!’ Is she high-bowed? That is the only type which over-rides the seas instead of smothering. Is she low? Low bows glide through the water where those collier-nosed brutes smash it open. Is she mucked up with submarine-catchers? They rather improve her trim. No other ship has them. Have they been denied to her? Thank Heaven, we go to sea without a fish-curing plant on deck. Does she roll, even for her class? She is drier than Dreadnoughts. Is she permanently and infernally wet? Stiff, sir?’ stiff: the first requisite of a gun-platform.

‘Service as Requisite’

Thus the Caesars and their fortunes put out to sea with their subs and their sad-eyed engineers, and their long-suffering signallers. I do not even know the technical name of the sin which causes a man to be born a destroyer-signaller in this life, and the little yellow shells stuck all about where they can be easiest reached. The rest of their acts is written for the information of the proper authorities. It reads like a page of Todhunter. But the masters of merchant-ships could tell more of eyeless shapes, barely outlined on the foam of their own arrest, who shout orders through the thick gloom alongside. The strayed and anxious neutral knows them when their searchlights pin him across the deep, or their syrens answer the last yelp of his as steam goes out of his torpedoed boilers, They stand by to catch and soothe him in his pyjamas at the gangway, collect his scattered lifeboats, and see a warm drink into him before they turn to hunt the slayer. The drifters, punching and reeling up and down their ten-mile line of traps; the outer trawlers, drawing the very teeth of Death with watersodden fingers, are grateful for their low, guarded signals; and when the Zeppelin’s revealing star-shell cracks darkness open above him the answering crack of the invincible destroyers’ guns comforts the busy mine-layers. Big cruisers talk to them, too; and, what is more, they talk back to the cruisers. Sometimes they draw fire, pinkish spurts of light, a long way off, where Fritz is trying to coax them over a minefield he has just laid; or they steal on Fritz in the midst of his job, and the horizon rings with barking, which the inevitable neutral who saw it all reports as ‘a heavy fleet action in the North Sea.’ The sea after dark can be as alive as the woods of summer nights. Everything is exactly where you don’t expect it, and the shyest creatures are the farthest away from their holes. Things boom overhead like bitterns, or scutter alongside like hares, or arise dripping and hissing from below like otters. It is the destroyers’business to find out what their business may be through all the long night, and to help or hinder accordingly. Dawn sees them pitch-poling insanely between head-seas, or hanging on to bridges that sweep like scythes from one forlorn horizon to the other. A homeward-bound submarine chooses this hour to rise, very ostentatiously, and signals by hand to a lieutenant in command. (They were the same term at Dartmouth, and same first ship.)

‘What’s he sayin’? Secure that gun, will you? Can’t hear oneself speak.’ The gun is a bit noisy on its cone, but that isn’t the reason for the destroyer-lieutenant’s short temper.

‘Says he’s goin’ down, sir,’ the signaller replies. What the submarine had spelt out, and

everybody knows it, was: ‘Cannot approve of this extremely frightful weather. Am going to bye- >bye.’

‘Well ‘, snaps the lieutenant to his signaller, ‘what are you grinning at?’ The submarine has hung on to ask if the destroyer will ‘kiss her and whisper good-night.’ A breaking sea smacks her tower in the middle of the insult. She closes like an oyster, but, jlust too late, Ha bet ! There must be a quarter of a ton of water somewhere down below, on its way to her ticklish batteries.

‘What a wag !’, says the signaller, dreamily. ‘Well, ‘e can’t say ‘e didn’t get ‘is little kiss.’

The lieutenant in command smiles. The sea is a beast, but a just beast.

Racial Untruths

This is trivial enough, but what would you have? If Admirals will not strike the proper attitudes, nor lieutenants emit the appropriate sentiments, one is forced back on the truth, which is that the men at the heart of great matters in our Empire are mostly of an even simplicity. From the advertising point of view they are stupid, but the breed has always been stupid in this department. It may be due, as our enemies assert, to our racial snobbery, or, as others hold, to a certain God-given lack of imagination which saves us from being over-concerned at the effects of our appearances on others. Either way, it deceives the enemies people more than any calculated lie. When you come to think of it, though the English are the worst paper-work and viva voce liars in the world, they have been rigorously trained since their early youth to live and act lies for the comfort of the society in which they move, and so for their own comfort. The result in this war is interesting.

It is no lie that at the present moment we hold all the seas in the hollow of our hands. For that reason we shuffle over them shame-faced and apologetic, making arrangements here and flagrant compromises there, in order to give substance to the lie that we have dropped fortuitously into this high seat and are looking round the world for some one to resign it to. Nor is it any lie that, had we used the Navy’s bare fist instead of its gloved hand from the beginning, we could in all likelihood have shortened the war. That being so, we elected to dab and peck at and half-strangle the enemy, to let him go and choke him again. It is no lie that we continue on our inexplicable path animated, we will try to believe till other proof is given, by a cloudy idea of alleviating or mitigating something for somebody, not ourselves. [Here, of course, is where our racial snobbery comes in, which makes the German gibber. I cannot understand why he has not accused us to our Allies of having secret commercial understandings with him.] For that reason, we shall finish the German eagle as the merciful lady killed the chicken. It took her the whole afternoon, and then, you will remember, the carcase had to be thrown away.

Meantime, there is a large and unlovely water, inhabited by plain men in severe boats, who endure cold, exposure, wet, and monotony almost as heavy as their responsibilities. Charge them with heroism, but that needs heroism, indeed! Accuse them of patriotism, they become ribald. Examine into the records of the miraculous work they have done and are doing. They will assist you, but with perfect sincerity they will make as light of the valour and forethought shown as of the ends they have gained for mankind. The Service takes all work for granted. It knew long ago that certain things would have to be done, and it did its best to be ready for them. When it disappeared over the sky-line for manoeuvres it was practising, always practising; trying its men and stuff and throwing out what could not take the strain. That is why, when war came, only a few names had to be changed, and those chiefly for the sake of the body, not of the spirit. And the Seniors who hold the key to our plans and know what will be done if things happen, and what links wear thin in the many chains, they are of one fibre and speech with the Juniors and the lower deck and all the rest who come out of the undemonstrative households ashore. ‘Here is the situation as it exists now,’ say the Seniors. ‘This is what we do to meet it. Look and count and measure and judge for yourself, and then you will know.’

It is a safe offer. The civilian only sees that the sea is a vast place, divided between wisdom and chance. He only knows that the uttermost oceans have been swept clear, and the trade-routes purged, one by one, even as our armies were being convoyed along them; that there was no island nor key left unsearched on any waters that might hide an enemy’s craft between the Arctic Circle and the Horn. He only knows that less than a day’s run to the eastward of where he stands, the enemy’s fleets have been held for a year and four months, in order that civilisation may go about its business on all our waters.

SEA WARFARE