Rudyard Kipling

“ In ancient days there was an etiquette in sea battles. No line-of-battle ship fired at a frigate unless the latter deliberately annoyed her. Then she blew the frigate out of the water. What will be the etiquette next time? Suppose a cruiser met a battleship with one set of engines unusable crawling along at eight knots. Would she jackal the lame thing and tempt her into wasting ammunition? It is a risky game to play with sides no thicker than an average tea-tray; but under circumstances it might be lucrative. Would she—and a fast cruiser can do this—try to rush her by night, destroyer-fashion? ”

“ As a rule the Captain has known him for a long time, often for ten or fifteen years, and the man follows his superior’s fortunes with unswerving loyalty, till he blossoms into the dignity of coxswain of the Admiral’s barge, beside whom dukes are not even three a penny. He is, by virtue of his office, the smartest man in the ship, and by training becomes a clean-shaved miracle of tact and discretion. Each boat’s crew have a life of their own, a little world, into which they enter, picking up where they left off, so soon as cutter or whaler leaves the ship’s side ”

“ If ‘White Jacket’ had not served before the mast, what a picture he might have given us of the Gunroom! It is at once a Republic and a Despotism—the Extreme Left and the unswerving Centre of old tradition. Individually it is always in hot water; collectively it can and does criticise with point and freedom anything and everything on its horizon, from Fleet Manœuvres to the fit of an Instructor’s collar. Pungent, merciless, indomitable is the Gunroom, but it preserves discipline. ”

“ The knowledge that one lucky shot might wreck two or three guns together does not make for happiness. This is why our guns are comparatively few in number, but exceedingly handy to work. A ship knows, of course, exactly where the crowd would of necessity be gathered in any craft opposed to her. Two or three shots in a nest of crowded guns, open ammunition-hoists, and piles of ‘ready’ cartridges, will do more moral and intellectual damage than the effacement of one or two guns in a line strung evenly from bow to stern. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What I had seen was a slow peddling-out of Admiralty allowance for the month, and it seemed to me more like squirting death through a hose than any ordinary gun-practice. What will it be when all the ammunition-hoists are working, when the Maxims’ water-jacket puffs off in steam; when the three-pounder charges come up a dozen at a time to be spent twenty to the minute; when the sole limit of four-inch fire is the speed with which the shells and cases can be handled? What will it be when the Real Thing is upon us? ”

“ A Navigating Lieutenant sprawled half over the table, cap tilted over forehead to keep out the glare of the lamp, is poring on a chart; we can hear the officer of the watch on her bridge speaking to his Quartermaster, and there comes over to us a whiff of Navy tobacco. She is slowing—she has slowed with a vengeance, and when ships slow too much they lose steerage-way, and, what is far worse, they wake the Captain. This strikes the Sub with lurid clearness; but the impetus of the recent ten knots is on us all, and we are all going much faster than we think. Again his foot taps the deck. ”

“ With the exception of the Captain, the Chief Engineer, and maybe a few petty officers, nobody was more than twenty-eight years old. They ranged in the ward-room from this resourceful age to twenty-six or seven clear-cut, clean-shaved young faces with all manner of varied experience behind them. When one comes to think, it is only just that a light 20-knot cruiser should be handled, under guidance of an older head, by affable young gentlemen prepared, even sinfully delighted, to take chances not set down in books. ”

“ He knows his men, if possible, better than the officers. He has seen, tried, approved, and discarded hundreds of dodges and tricks in all departments of the ship. At a pinch he can wring the last ounce out of his subordinates by appeals unbefitting for an officer to make, by thrusts at pride and vanity, which he has studied more intimately than any one else. Hear him expounding his gospel to a youth who does not yet realise that the Navy is his father and his mother and his only Aunt Jemima; go out with him when he is in charge of a cutter ”

“ The days are over for us when men piled baronial keeps, flat-irons, candlesticks, and Doré towers on floating platforms. The New Navy offers to the sea precisely as much to take hold of as the trim level-headed woman with generations of inherited experience offers to society. It is the provincial, aggressive, uncompromising, angular, full of excellently unpractical ideas, who is hurt, and jarred, and rasped in that whirl. In other words, she is not a good sea-boat and cannot work her guns in all weathers. ”

“ From time to time a red-eyed black demon, with flashing teeth, shot into the ward-room for a bite and a drink, cried out the number of tons aboard, added a few pious words on the collier’s appliances, and our bunkers (‘Like a lot of bunion-plasters,’ the stoker had said) , and tore back to where the donkey-engines wheezed, the bags crashed, the shovels rasped and scraped, the boom whined and creaked, and the First Lieutenant, carved in pure jet, said precisely what occurred to him. Before the collier cast off a full-blooded battleship sent over a boat to take some measurements of her hatch. ”

“ One thing more than all the rest impresses the passenger on a Queen’s ship. She is seldom for three whole hours at the same speed. The liner clear of her dock strikes her pace and holds it to her journey’s end, but the man-of-war must always have two or three knots up her sleeve in case the Admiral demands a spurt; she must also be ready to drop three or four knots at the wave of a flag ”

“ Out came two violins, a mandoline, and bagpipes, and the ward-room disported itself among tunes of three Nations till War should be declared. In the middle of a scientific experiment as to how the ship’s kitten might be affected by bagpipes that hour struck, and even more swiftly than pussy fled under the sofa the trim mess-jackets melted away, the chaff ceased, the hull shivered to the power of the steam-capstan, the slapping of the water on our sides grew, and we glided through the moored Fleet to the mouth of Lough Swilly. ”

“ Their slang borrows from the engine-room, the working parts of guns, the drill-book, and the last music-hall song. It is delivered in a tight-lipped undertone; the more excruciatingly funny parts without a shade of expression. The first thing that strikes a casual observer is their superb health; next, their quiet adequateness; and thirdly, a grave courtesy. But under the shell of the new Navy beats the heart of the old. All Marryat’s immortals are there, better fed, better tended, better educated, but at heart unchanged. ”

“ And the weather was vile. Once again we headed W.N.W. in company at an average speed of between thirteen and fourteen knots on a straightaway run of three hundred and fifty miles toward the Rockal Bank and the lonely rock that rises out of the sea there. The idea was that our enemy might have made this his rendezvous, in which case we had hope of catching him en masse.
Through that penitential day the little cruiser was disgustingly lively, but all we took aboard was spray, whereas the low-bowed battleships slugged their bluff noses into the surge and rose dripping like half-tide rocks. ”

“ A stoker had risen silently as a seal for a breath of air, and stood, chest to the breeze, scanning the Fleet lights.
‘’Ullo! Wot’s the matter with your condenser?’ said the Marine. ‘You’d better take your mucky ’ands off them hammick-cloths or you’ll be spoke to.’
‘Our bunkers,’ said the figure, addressing his grievance to the sea-line, ‘are stuck all about like a lot o’ women’s pockets. They’re stuck about like a lot o’ bunion-plasters. That’s what our bunkers are.’ He slipped back into the darkness. Presently a signalman pattered by to relieve his mate on the bridge. ”

“ Cruisers are wondrous human. In the afternoon the battleships overtook us, their white upperworks showing like icebergs as they topped the sea-line. Then we sobered our faces, and the engineers had rest, and at a wave of the Admiral’s flag off Land’s End our Fleet was split in twain. One half would go outside Ireland, toying with the weight of the Atlantic en route, to Blacksod Bay, while we turned up the Irish Channel to Lough Swilly. There we would coal, and wait for War. ”

“ They are young on the destroyers—the chattering black decks are no place for the middle-aged—they have learned how to handle 200ft. of shod death that cover a mile in two minutes, turn in their own length, and leap to racing speed almost before a man knows he has signalled the engine-room. In these craft they risk the extreme perils of the sea and make experiments of a kind that would not read well in print. It would take much to astonish them when, at the completion of their command, they are shifted, say, to a racing cruiser. ”

“ Behind him is his own honour and reputation; the honour of his ship and her imperious demands; for there is no excuse in the Navy. If he fails in any one particular he severs just one nerve of the ship’s life. If he fails in all the ship dies—a prisoner to the set of the sea—a gift to the nearest enemy. ”

“ The leading ship has slowed a certain number of revolutions—say, from ten knots to nine and a half; but she has not changed her speed-lights in time. We slide out to the right of our next ahead, swiftly and quietly. And now we must all mark time, as it were, till our leader straightens herself. That which was a line has suddenly become a town on the waters; representing roughly three-quarters of a million sterling in value, ten thousand tons weight, and eight hundred lives. Our next ahead lies on our port bow, and—oh, horror!—our next astern is alongside of us. ”

“ We must have burned more coal than would ever be expedient in War, and we saw imaginary hulls with great zeal till the glorious sunrise, cut off from the battle, peering over the nettings, wet with dew, and just as ignorant of events around us as we shall be when the Real Thing begins. ”

“ Such a country it was as, without much imagination, one could perceive its children in exile would sicken for—a land of small holdings and pleasant green ways where nobody did more work than was urgent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then we danced; for this also is the custom of the Navy, that when a man has been working like several niggers all day he should, on chance given, dance. And that is why the Naval man dances so well. He begins, as I have seen, on the Britannia, whose decks are fairly open. Then he dances on such occasions as these, in and out among all the fittings of a battleship’s deck.
‘Makes us awfully handy with our feet,’ said Twenty-One, mopping himself in the pauses of a waltz. ”

“ Sometimes the talk gets serious, and the weather-bitten faces discuss how they would ‘work her in a row.’ Each delivers his opinion with side-digs at his neighbour, less heavily armoured or more lightly gunned, but the general conclusion (which I shall not give) is nearly always the same. It is a terrible power that they wield, these Captains, for, saving the Admiral, there is no one that can dictate to them in the exercise of their business. They make their ships as they make or unmake the careers of their men. ”

“ Our whaler would go out between lights under pretence of practising, but really for the purpose of insulting other whalers whom she had beaten in inter-ship contests. Boat-racing is to the mariner what horse-racing is to the landsman. The way of it is simple. When your racing crew is in proper condition, you row under the bows of the ship you wish to challenge and throw up an oar. If you are very confident, or have a long string of victories to your credit, you borrow a cock from the hen-coops and make him crow. ”

“ The filled belts of the Maxims were adjusted, and all these man-slaying deviltries waked to life and peered over the side at the unsuspecting gulls. It was ‘still’ throughout the ship—still as it will be when the Real Thing arrives. From the upper bridge I could hear, above the beat of the engines, the click of the Lieutenants’ scabbards (Why should men who need every freedom in action be hampered by an utterly useless sword?) ”

“ It is in the Navy that you hear the wildest and freest adjectives of any Service, the most blistering characterisation of superiors, the most genuinely comic versions of deeds that elsewhere might be judged heroic. ”

“ We (I speak for our cruiser) are not addicted to swear in the words of the torpedo Lieutenant because we do not carry those fittings; but we do all devoutly believe that it is the business of a cruiser to shoot much and often (see Note III) . What follows is, of course, nonsense—the merest idle chaff of equals over cigarettes; but rightly read it has its significance.
‘The first thing to do,’ says authority aged Twenty-One, ‘is to be knocked silly by concussion in the conning-tower. Then you revive when all the other chaps are dead, and win a victory off your own bat—à la illustrated papers. ”