Rudyard Kipling

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Creep into the stoke-hold a boiler blistering either ear as you stoop and taste what tinned air is like for a while. Face the intolerable white glare of the opened furnace doors; get into a bunker and see how they pass coal along and up and down; stand for five minutes with slice and 'devil' to such labour as the stoker endures for four hours. ”

“ Here the men smoke at the permitted times, and in clubs and coteries gossip and say what they please of each other and their superiors. Their speech is soft (if everyone spoke aloud you could not hear yourself think on a cruiser) , their gestures are few (if a man swung his arms about he would interfere with his neighbour) , their steps are noiseless as they pop in and out of the forward flats; they are at all times immensely interesting, and, as a rule, delightfully amusing. Their slang borrows from the engine-room, the working parts of guns, the drill-book, and the last music-hall song. ”

“ And when the stuff comes alongside in charge of a slow-minded understrapper they do attend to it. They talk the man blind and dumb, sack his cargoes, and turn him adrift to study vouchers at his leisure. Then the First Lieutenant grins like a Cheshire cat; the carpenter, so called because he very rarely deals with wood, the armourer and the first-class artificers sweat with joy, and the workshop lathes buzz and hum. But the understrapper gets particular beans because a great part of his stuff was meant for another ship, and she is very angry about it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
A SERVICE OF HUMOURISTS
Things are all too deadly serious and important for any one to insult by taking seriously. Every branch of the Service is forced to be a humourist in spite of itself; and by the time men reach the rank of Captain the least adaptable have some saving sense of fun hammered into them. ”

“ For seven years, counting his time in the Britannia, he dresses at a chest and sleeps in a hammock, getting to know himself and his associates with that deadly stark intimacy that only flourishes in the Navy. There are no excuses in his Service. He must not answer back; and he must do what he is told—not immediately, but sooner, much sooner. These are the years that weed out those that have mistaken their calling. The incompetents go home, and curse the Navy evermore. The virtuous stay on and learn to steal brass boiler-tubes for their boats ”

“ We had it all to ourselves—the rifted purple flank of Lackawee, the long vista of the lough darkening as the shadows fell; the smell of a new country, and the tearing wind that brought down mysterious voices of men from somewhere high above us.
None but the Irish can properly explain away failure. We left with our dozen fingerlings, under the impression—Mister Cornelius Crowley gave it—that we had caught ten-pounders. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ A dull glow breaks out at the mast-head of that transmitter of wiggings—and a wigging it is for somebody—a wigging in drunken winks—long and short ones—irresistibly comic if you don't happen to be in the Service. Once again we are saved. The avenging electric spells out the name of our next ahead, a second-class cruiser—and then—'Why don't you keep station?' Let us thank God for second-class cruisers and all other lightning-conductors! ”

“ Then we jump about an' curse if they don't give us enough steam. I swear I think they're no end good men in the engine room!'
If you doubt this, descend by the slippery steel ladders into the bluish copper-smelling haze of hurrying mechanism all crowded under the protective deck; crawl along the greasy foot-plates, and stand with your back against the lengthwise bulkhead that separates the desperately whirling twin engines. Wait under the low-browed supporting-columns till the roar and the quiver has soaked into every nerve of you; till your knees loosen and your heart begins to pump. ”

“ Mine were the speed and power of the hulls, not here only but the world over; the hearts and brains and lives of the trained men; such strength and such power as we and the World dare hardly guess at. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her sides are smooth as a water-worn pebble, curved and moulded as the sea loves to have them. Where the box-sponsioned, overhanging, treble-turreted ships of some other navies hammer and batter into an element they do not understand, she, clean, cool, and sweet, uses it to her own advantage. ”

“ 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. ”

“ MEN WHO TAKE THEIR CHANCES
Under these conditions the possibilities of a good sea-boat are almost illimitable, given always the men who know how to handle her—the men who will take their chances. And as in the Army so in the Navy runs the unwritten Law: 'You must not imperil the property of the taxpayer committed to your charge or you will be publicly broke; but if you do not take every risk you can and more also you will be broke in the estimation of your fellows. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Swaying a little in her gait, drunk with sheer delight of movement, perfectly apt for the work in hand, and in every line of her rejoicing that she is doing it, she shows, to these eyes at least, a miracle of grace and beauty. ”

“ He would have left a white mark on the Assistant-Engineer, whose work lay in the stokehold among a gang of new Irish stokers. Never but once have I been in our engine-rooms; and I do not go again till I can take with me their designer for four hours at full speed. The place is a little cramped and close, as you might say. A steel guard, designed to protect men from a certain toothed wheel round the shaft, shore through its bolts and sat down, much as a mudguard sits down on a bicycle-wheel. But the wheel it sat on was also of steel; spinning one hundred and ninety revolutions per minute. ”

“ THE STRONGEST FLEET IN THE WORLD.
A monstrous plume of black, heavy smoke went up to the sky. We whipped round a buoy and came on the Fleet. There were eight battleships alike as peas to the outsider; and four big cruisers. They were not cruising or manœuvring just then; but practising their various arts and crafts. ”

“ And that is one of the ways in which youth gets learning. On a big battleship, they tell me, the Sub is little better than the Midshipmen he despises. He lives in the gun-room, he goes to school, he is sent on errands, and if he is good he is allowed to preserve discipline while a fraction of the decks are being washed. But on a third-class cruiser he is a watch-officer, an ornament of the ward-room, pitched into responsibility, and he enjoys himself, as I have tried to show. ”

“ With the Navigating Lieutenant 'on the 'igh an' lofty bridge persecuting his vocation' you have studied stars, mast-head angles, range-finders, and such all; the First Lieutenant has enlightened you on his duties as an Upper Housemaid, (see Note Ia.) and the Juniors have guided you through the giddy whirl of gunnery, small-arm drill, getting up an anchor, and taking kinks out of a cable. So it comes that next time you see, even far off, one of Her Majesty's cruisers, all your heart goes out to her. Men live there. ”

“ Some day, when I know more, I will write about engine-rooms and stokers' accommodation the manners and customs of Naval Engineers and their artificers. They are an amazing breed, these quiet, rather pale men, in whose hands lie the strength and power of the ship.
'Just think what they've got to stand up to,' says Twenty-One, with the beautiful justice of youth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Later on I heard some interesting tales of craft—excursion steamers for choice—anchoring between a man-of-war and her target because their captains had heard that there would be gun practice, and the passengers, at a shilling a head, wished to see the fun.
'But they didn't think,' said my informant, 'that I was the man who'd have been hung, drawn, and quartered if a life was lost. They anchored slap behind the Island I was firing at—experimental firing at a dummy gun, if you please, with six-inchers, twelve-pounders, and Maxims all turned loose together. ”

“ E's found an 'ole in the rules an' slipped through it,' was the burden of our song. 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. ”