Bartimeus

“ The after-cabin, that had witnessed so many informal tea-and-muffin parties, has been an ether-reeking hospital.
Yet these memories grew blurred in time, as mercifully such memories do. It was another and more fragrant one that sweetened the grim winter vigil in the North, when every smudge of smoke on the horizon might have been the herald of Armageddon. They were yet to see men die by scores in the shambles of a wrecked battery, by hundreds on the shell-torn decks of a ship that sank, fighting gallantly to the last. ”

“ She obtruded upon his thoughts as sunlight enters a room past curtains waving in the breeze, while with the dour perversity of his queer nature he tried to shut her out.
There were women about whom no one could cherish any illusions; with these Graeme Jakes was half contemptuously, half pityingly at ease. But in Claire Mayne he saw someone who approached so exquisitely to his ideal of womanhood that he dreaded disillusionment. Thus and thus must his goddess be fashioned, and the first word or act of hers that betrayed feet of clay would have filled him with bitterness and disappointment. ”

“ Even the fellows who die, die as if it all came in the day's work." His mind reverted to its original line of thought. "But even dying is a little thing as long as all this is undefiled." He smoked in silence for a minute.
"Death!" he continued jerkily, as if feeling for his ideas at an unaccustomed depth. "I've seen so much of Death, Betty: in every sort of guise and disguise, and I'm not sure that he isn't only the biggest impostor, really. A bogie to frighten happiness.... A turnip-mask with a candle inside, stuck up just round some corner along the road of life." ”

“ Once clear of their own bases and the sight of war signal stations, the submarine is an outlaw on the high seas, fending for itself in the teeth of friend or foe. True there is an elaborate system of recognition signals in force, but the bluff seamen in command of the armed auxiliaries that guard the seaways round the coast have a way of acting first and talking afterwards. It is the way of the sea.
A homing submarine on the surface encountered one of these gale-battered craft, and in spite of vehement signals found herself under a rain of projectiles from the trawler’s gun. ”

“ Casey, hinting at a spin in the galley, somehow reminded one of a spaniel when he sees the gun-case opened. Had he been blessed with a tail, he would most certainly have wagged it.
The Captain walked slowly aft and looked down into the galley lying at the quarter-boom. Few men could have resisted the appeal of that long slim boat with the water lapping invitingly against her clinker-built sides. The brasswork in her gleamed in the sun like jewels set in ivory, for the woodwork was as near the whiteness of ivory as holystone and sharkskin could make it. ”

“ I saw my First Lieutenant forward busy about the slip of the cable; I saw the top above me shattered by a shell, and after a silence heard the pom-pom there break out again undismayed. The upper deck was a reeking shambles, with men pouring down into it from the Mole, exhausted, bloody, and triumphant. Nearly every man carried a wounded mate slung across his back, and most of them had a chunk of masonry or a fragment of shell gripped in his fist to bring back as a "souvenir" of the night's work—as if their memories or those of their children's children needed any such reminder. ”

“ Despatch-case in hand, d'Auvergne, the King's Messenger, emerged from the Admiralty by one of the small doors opening on to the Mall. He paused on the step for a moment, meditating. The policeman on duty touched his helmet.
"Taxi, sir?"
"No, thanks," replied d'Auvergne. "I think I'll walk; I've not far to go."
Dusk was settling down over the city as he turned off into St. James's Park, but the afterglow of the sunset still lingered above the Palace and in the soft half-light the trees and lawns held to their vivid green. A few early lamps shone with steady brilliance beyond the foliage. ”

“ Where the long yellow seas break in clouds of surf across sandbanks and no man dares to follow, they lie and draw their breath. Their inquisitive periscopes rise and dip in the churning wake of the German minesweepers themselves. They rise out of the ambush of depths where the groundswell of a forgotten gale stirs the sand into a fog; and an unsuspecting Zeppelin, flying low, lumbers, buzzing angrily, out of range of their high-angle gun. ”

“ The smoke from the funnels hung like a long dark smear against the pearly light of the dawn; but as the pearl changed to primrose and the primrose to saffron, the sombre streamers dissolved into the mists of morning.
Somewhere among the islands on our starboard bow a little wind awoke and brought with it the scent of heather and moist earth. It was a good smell—just such a smell as our nostrils had hungered for for many months—and it stirred a host of vagrant memories as it went sighing past the halliards and shrouds. ”

“ It was dusk when they reached the outlying Cruisers, and nearly dark when the first ship in the Battle Fleet hailed them. Then hail answered hail as one Battleship after another rose towering above them into the darkling sky, and one by one passed into silence astern.
Silence also had fallen on the singers. Seen thus from an open boat under the lowering wings of night, there was something awe-inspiring—even to these who lived onboard them—in the stupendous fighting outlines limned against the last of the light. ”

“ The drone above us seemed suddenly to become a rushing roar of sound, and a blast of machine-gun fire swept the deck and bridge as a flight of seaplanes whizzed overhead flying low, so that I could see the goggled faces of the pilots behind the spurts of flame from their guns. The next instant they were gone again in the mist. It was the last sting from the hornets' nest we had been burning out, and Milsom was at my feet leaning on his one arm and staring stupidly at the thin dark stream trickling across the planking. The Destroyers on our beam were firing fruitlessly into the mist. ”

“ Margaret settled her back comfortably against a ridge of turf and closed her eyes for a moment.
"Isn't it heavenly up here? The wind smells of seaweed, and there must be some shrub or flower——" She opened her eyes and looked along the cliffs, "There's something smelling divinely. Wild broom, is it?"
Her gaze travelled along the succession of ragged headlands and crescents of sand formed by each little bay of the indented coast. The coastguard track, a brown thread winding adventurously among the clumps of gorse at the very edge of the cliffs, drew her eyes farther and farther to the west. ”

“ From first to last their ways are plain for all men to behold. They fight, and if need be, die, heartened by the reek of cordite-smoke and cheering, or full-flight between the sun and the gaze of breathless armies. It is otherwise with the Navy-under-the-Sea.
Submarines may leave harbour in pairs, their conning-towers awash, and the busy hand-flags exchanging dry witticisms and personalities between the respective captains. But as the land fades astern, of necessity their ways part; it is a rule of the game in the Submarine Service that you do your work alone ”

“ Every gun and howitzer on board opened fire with a roar that shook the ship from bridge to keel. The machine-guns in the top broke into a hysterical chatter, and all along the Mole bursts of flame belched forth. The shrapnel was spattering about the upperworks like hailstones, and as I got the bows round, heading for the Mole, I felt the ship check and shudder as a heavy shell struck her. ”

“ Von Sperrgebiet's reflections came to an end with his cigarette. He tossed the stump overboard, and raising a pair of glasses he focused them intently on the horizon to the eastward.
For the space of nearly a minute he sat thus staring. From the interior of the Submarine came the strains of a gramophone playing a German patriotic air, and with it the smell of coffee. The crew were at dinner, and a man's deep laugh floated up the shaft of the conning-tower as if coming from the bowels of the sea. ”

“ A crippled German destroyer, crawling out of range, down by the stern, like a hare whose hindquarters have been paralysed by a clumsy sportsman: an enemy light cruiser, dismasted, funnels over the side, one gun spitting defiance from a shambles of a battery as she sank: a great battleship listing over, all aswarm with specks of humanity—surely it was none of our noisy doing? ”

“ The Thermos flask slid with a clatter on to the steel deck of the top, and the Indiarubber Man opened his eyes. He yawned and stretched himself and rose stiffly to his feet.
The first rays of the sun were rising out of the sea. "Hai-yah!" He yawned. "Another bloomin' day. . . . I was dreaming . . . about . . . blowed if I can remember what I was dreaming about." He adjusted the focus of his glasses and stared out across the North Sea. "I wonder if they're coming out to-day."
It was the two hundred and seventy-third morning we had wondered that. ”

“ He had a vision of the electric-lit interior of the great ship, deck beneath deck, with men everywhere. Men rolled up in coats and oilskins, snatching half-an-hour's sleep along the crowded gun-batteries, men writing letters to sweethearts and wives, men laughing and quarrelling, or singing low-toned, melancholy ditties as they mended worn garments: hundreds and hundreds of reasoning human entities were crowded in those steel-walled spaces, each with his boundless hopes and affections, his separate fears and vices and conceptions of the Deity, and his small, incommunicable distresses.... ”

“ Out of the wreaths of fog and tobacco-smoke forward drifted presently the strains of an accordion——
"It's a long, long way to Tipperary...." The voices of the men, singing under their breath as they worked, blended restfully with the throb of the engines and the swish of water past the ship's side. A little breeze sprang up, tearing rifts here and there in the surrounding fog; a few pale gleams of sunlight filtered through, and on the fore-bridge of the Cruiser the Yeoman of Signals raised his glass and steadied it against the topmost rail. ”

“ When the supply of motor-boats ran out, the wealthier yachtsmen built their own, fitted them out at their own expense, and manned them. They manned them indiscriminately: one was a captain, another was a deck-hand, and yet another club-mate the engineer. It mattered not a whit how or where a man served as long as the spray was in their faces and the dawn came up out of their beloved sea. They messed together in cheerful communism, save when they found themselves under the immediate observation of the brass-bound Navy. ”

“ Thus with James Thorogood, Lieutenant, Royal Navy, when he—together with his bath, bedding, clothes, and scanty cabin furniture, revolver, first-aid outfit, and all the things that were his—was precipitated through his cabin door across the aft-deck. The ship heeled violently, and the stunning sound of the explosion died away amid the uproar of men's voices along the mess-deck and the tinkle and clatter of broken crockery in the wardroom pantry. ”

“ But of that foe, none of the hundreds of men between decks save the straining gunlayers with their eyes at the sighting-telescopes would ever catch a single glimpse.
The silence was riven by a roaring concussion that seemed to shake the framework of the ship. The great turret guns on the upper deck had opened fire with a salvo, and, as if released by the explosion, a burst of frantic cheering leaped from every throat and echoed and reverberated along the decks. Somewhere in the outside world of mist and sea, under the grey Northern sky, the Battle-Fleet action had begun. ”