Except for the actual lift she receives from a wave, a battleship rolling in a beam sea moves a good deal like an inverted pendulum, so that one feels a minimum of motion when he is down against the skin of a lower hold and the maximum in the foretop. The transition had been a sudden one for me that morning, for the Gunnery Lieutenant, who had been initiating me into the secrets of "Director Firing" in the foretop, brought me back to the main deck and turned me over to the Senior Engineer, who had volunteered to show me what "rough weather" stoking was like.
The big ship was wallowing with that ever-disconcerting "hang" at the end of a roll, such a pause as one never experiences in an ocean liner which (with no heavy guns and only light upper works) needs no great amount of time to make up its mind as to whether or not it is worth while going to the trouble of getting back on an even keel. As we put one reeling steel ladder after another above us in our descent, the roll decreased as the tumult of crashing waves was stilled to muffled jolts, and, with a flight or two still to go, we were steady enough on our feet tohave both hands free to lift the heavy air-tight "flap" of the boiler-room.
As I ducked under the "flap" the chill, damp, clammily clinging air of the decks above was assailed by a sharp blast which, however hot and dry, was still (at least in comparison with the heavy atmosphere of the higher 'tween decks spaces) fresh and invigorating. Although far from an earthly paradise in a ship on an equatorial run, the stokehold of a battleship that is battened down against heavy winter weather is in some respects the most comfortable spot aboard her.
Certainly the half-dozen brawny fellows who sat or lounged against the steel bulkhead of the half of the boiler-room into which we had descended did not look to be having anything like so bad a time of it as an equal number of oilskinned seamen I had seen but a few minutes before bracing themselves against the seas sweeping the icy forecastle deck as they tried to repair a smashed ventilator. Grimy they were, to be sure, but otherwise there was little about them to suggest the sweating, stripped-to-the-waist, in-to-the-last-gasp stoker of romance and popular fancy.
To one who has pictured the stoker as a gaunt-eyed demon steadily shovelling coal under a boiler for four hours, the first glimpse of a stokehold of a warship that is in no great hurry to get somewhere will come as a good deal of a surprise. The place is neither especially dirty nor especially hot. Neither the letting the coal slidedown by its own weight from the encompassing bunkers nor the cracking up of the occasional lumps which are too large for even combustion raises as much dust as the dumping of a single sack upon one of the upper decks.
The footing on the grilled steel plates of the deck is firm and sure, and, as I have said, there is less motion in the stokehold than in any other part of the ship. It might conceivably happen in destroyers, but the stories of men half-roasted from being thrown against the furnace doors in storms do not originate on battleships.
But let us see how these comfortable, easy-moving chaps manage to handle the fuel sufficient to send twenty-five or thirty thousand tons of steel hurtling through the seas with so little apparent haste or effort. The running back of a sliding steel door brings a stream of coal running out of one of the bunkers, coal which, dumped from sacks into the entrance of a chute on one of the upper decks, has worked its way downward by gravity as that beneath it has been fed to the furnaces. This stream is caught in a "skip" of steel, shaped like the half of a cylinder and capable of holding something like a couple of hundredweight. Sliding fairly easily over the grilled deck—pushed by one man and pulled by another—the "skip" loads are dumped evenly along in front of the twelve doors which open—four to each—to the three furnaces under the boilers occupying this half of the stokehold. Now we come to the actual stoking.
A bell suddenly clangs, echoing sharply fromthe steel walls, and instantly two of the lounging figures quicken to the alert. One scoops up a shovelful of coal and the other steps forward and rests a hand on the lever running to one of the furnace doors. A second or two later, as a number shows on a dial at the side, the latter pushes the lever sharply, and the door is pressed upwards, revealing a glowing bed of fire running back out of sight under the boiler. The shovel is already swinging forward as the door rises, and, missing that steel plate by a fraction of an inch, its contents are discharged—with a quick "wristy" motion which scatters the coal evenly over the fire—into the furnace.
As the shovel is drawn back the lever is released, permitting the door to fall shut of its own weight. With all possible speed another scoop is filled with coal and the operation repeated once or twice more according to the speed which it is desired to maintain. Then the two men relax and stand at ease until another clanging of the bell heralds the number of the next furnace to be fired. Then the door is lifted and the coal thrown in as before, the operation going on until each of the twelve has received its two, three, or four shovels, when—always subject to the indicator on the wall—it begins over again.
If a lump of coal is larger than a man's fist it is cracked up before being thrown into the furnace. As the stoker swings his filled shovel toward the opening door his trained eye is looking for two things—a pronounced hollow in thebed of coals, or a spot in which the duller glow tells him the combustion is considerably advanced. If neither is visible he gives his shovel a very sharp side flirt and spreads its contents just as widely and evenly as he possibly can. If he observes a hollow he endeavours to even it up with fresh coal. A burnt-out spot also receives fresh fuel, and if there is evidence of the formation of a crust of "clinker," this may be marked for a subsequent cracking up with the "slice," a long steel bar which serves the purpose of a poker. Every effort is bent toward maintaining a smooth, evenly burning bed of coals under all of the boiler.
Automatic regulation of stoking is no new thing in warships, and was even in use on the latest of the Atlantic liners running before the war. The machine most commonly in use by the British is the "Kilroy," and its object is to raise a given amount of steam with a minimum of coal and physical effort.
Thoroughly to understand its workings one should go first to the engine-room, from where it is regulated. The order for a certain speed is sent from the bridge to the engine-room, and the engineer sets his "Kilroy" so that the stoking shall proceed at a rate calculated to produce the necessary steam. The dial of the machine is numbered from "3" to "12," and the number he turns the indicator to—say "7"—rings up the numbers of the furnace doors in the boiler-room at a rate which will ensure that each shall be stoked every seven minutes.
The number of shovelfuls of coal to be thrown in at each stoking is determined by consulting first the telegraph from the bridge (which registers in both the engine-room and stokehold) and a table which each stoker knows by heart. The dial of the telegraph is marked as follows: "Keep Steam," "Stop," "Slow," "Half Speed," "Full Speed," "More Steam." The table referred to gives the number of shovels to be thrown on at each stoking to fulfil the direction on the telegraph. Thus "Slow" calls for from two to three shovels of coal, "Full" four to six, and "More Steam" from six to eight.
This plan gives perhaps the most perfect control of stoking possible without mechanical handling of the coal, and that is hardly practicable on shipboard. Practically all modern coal-burning ships carry a small supply of oil fuel, which is, however, generally used very sparingly and kept for raising steam pressure quickly in great emergency.
It was while I was being initiated into the technique of stoking by shovelling coal under the boilers at the rate indicated to keep the steam at "Half" that a change of course brought the swinging seas dead abeam and set the ship rolling even more drunkenly than before. After failing to hit the "dark spots" and "hollows" two or three times as I staggered to the roll, and once even missing the furnace door itself, one of the stokers, taking compassion, relieved me of the scoop and put the trouble right with half a dozen quickly tossed shovelfuls.
I was frankly glad to work over to where I could take a "half Nelson" round a bar by the starboard bunker, for the way the open mouth of the furnace was suddenly jumping up at me in the lurches was something more than disconcerting, especially after one of my fellow stokers had told me that his scarred forearm was the result of having once been pitched forward against a red-hot door of the furnace under a destroyer's boiler.
It was easy to see that stoking the furnaces of a ship with a 25 to 30 degree roll is no job for a novice. Keeping one's balance without holding on to something was difficult enough all of the time, and there were intervals when it was a sheer impossibility. Yet the inexorable gong rang out its warnings just the same, and when the number of the door to be stoked slipped into place on the dial, the particular stretch of glowing coals commanded by that aperture had to be fed willy-nilly.
With the coal "skip" doing a dervish dance from one end to the other of the narrow space, and with even lumps of the coal itself indulging in punitive expeditions on their own account, the waiting stoker needed all the quick-wittedness and shifty-footedness of a bull-fighter combined with the nicety of balance of a tight-rope walker to carry on at all. Yet carry on he did, and with only less clocklike a regularity than the imperturbable "Kilroy" itself.
A heavy slam-banging from the opposite end of the boiler-room indicated that things werenot going quite so smoothly there, and edging cautiously along I was presently able to get some hint of the cause from the words of a volubly cursing stoker who limped out to tell me that the "blinkin' skip 'as took charge." Rubbing a bruised shin and glowering balefully from a blackened eye which appeared to have bumped against a boiler, he explained, in language more forceful than elegant, that some unpractical theorist had encouraged them to experiment with wheels on the side of the skip with the idea of making it easier to push about over the coal-cluttered deck. This had turned out a very satisfactory "safe-in-harbour" expedient, but the increased mobility which had been so useful in fair weather had proved its undoing in foul.
In the picturesque language of the sea, it had "taken charge," and so effectually that one swift, straight rush to starboard, followed by a "googly" progress back to port, put every man who, either by chance or intent, barred its way more or lesshors de combat. When I peeped gingerly round a corner the sight I saw was vividly suggestive of those good old days of mass play American football when a burly half-back was bucking the line of his demoralised opponents.
The heavy three-quarters-full skip had slammed down against the port bunkers when the ship rolled to that side, and in the second or two she hung there before swinging back again half a dozen men had thrown themselves uponit in an effort to "clip its wings" by removing the wheels. Either the time was too short, or else they had got in each other's way.
At any rate, the wheels were still in position to go round when the battleship, sliding down the reverse of the big wave that had thrown her over, tilted her decks back the other way. Straight down the one-in-three incline from the port to the starboard bunkers lolloped the Juggernaut, dashing the protesting anatomies of the stokers to left and right as it went. Spitting blood and oaths indiscriminately, one man clung to it all the way, however, and he it was who, taking advantage of the tilt, finally rendered it harmless by pushing it over on its side, where it was left wriggling impotently like an overturned turtle.
Meanwhile the "Kilroy" had been ringing up its numbers in vain, and it took several minutes of fast shovelling by all hands to bring the fires up to where they would have been had the interruption not occurred.
It was about this time that the bridge called on the engine-room for an increase of speed, and it was that, with a change of course, that sent the mounting seas crashing over the starboard bow, which brought my visit to the stokeholds to a sudden and unceremonious end. There came a shivering crash, followed by a momentary halt like that which throws one against his neighbour in a jerkily-braked tramcar.
The great ship staggered groggily for a second or two as a weight of solid water equalto her own was launched against her. Then the relentless urge of her spinning screws drove her forward, with the dish of her rigid hull skimming a few thousand tons off the top of the uprearing wave that had assailed her. The most of the mighty cataclysm surged to lee and back into the sea again, but wherever there was an opening—by gun-port, by ventilator, by unbattened hatch—it poured below in thunderous torrents. Deck by deck, where we had descended so laboriously by tilting ladders, we heard it bounding lower and lower, and then (just how and by where I never exactly understood) the flood was all about us.
"If we ship two or three more like that it'll be getting to the fires," shouted the warrant officer who had taken me over from the Senior Engineer; "we'll only be in the way here; we'd best get up while we can. I've stood all the watches I care to in flooded stokeholds in the years I was a stoker myself."
Over steel plates that were rocking with the wash of the water that had penetrated beneath them, he led me to a little electric lift into which the two of us were just able to crowd and slide the door. "Never thought much of this thing," he said as the car began to ascend after two or three propitiatory prods at the button; "there's too much chance of getting stalled halfway and spending the night like a tinned herring. But even that would be better than getting caught by another waterfall on one of the ladders. Besides, she seems to be going all right anyway."
Half a minute later the little lift came to a creaking standstill, and we squeezed out to a ladder which led up to the main deck. The wash swirled to our knees in an angle of the mess-deck, but the warrant officers' mess, to which I was conducted by my guide, was warm and dry. Toasting bread for our tea in the genial glow of the electric heater, he told me yarns of the days when he himself had (to use his own picturesque expression) "stood at the small end of a shovel" before the furnace doors.
He had once been scalded with escaping steam in the hold of an old cruiser off the coast of South America, once imprisoned in the stokehold of a destroyer for forty-eight hours in a gale in the sub-Arctic, and once he had been "mentioned" for putting out a fire started by a German shell in some nondescript craft in which he found himself at the time the British Navy was trying to protect the retreat along the Flemish coast. The latter sounded like a "story," and I threw a "lead" or two to draw it out. This was about all I got.
"The oldFlightygot in too close," he said, turning the slice on his toasting fork, "and the Huns opened up on us with bigger stuff than we reckoned they had there. There was a big crash, just like when a big lump of sea hits you, only worse, and all the stokers and me (I was a petty officer then) was knocked flat. We were under forced draught, and the fires needing all the coal we could pitch on to them. No one was much hurt, and I got them to shovelling again as soonas I could. Then I took a squint up the ventilator down which most of the shock seemed to come.
"There was a bit of a fire getting under way up there, and so I pitched up two or three buckets of water and put it out. Didn't notice till afterwards that a small fragment of shell had come down and hit me in the forehead—right here" (touching a jagged cut just under the hair).
"Captain seemed rather pleased about it, as the men on fire station in that part of the ship had been knocked out, and he appeared to think I had kept the blaze from getting a big headway.
"'Nother funny thing"—and he went on to tell of a stoker of a trawler who, after having his face slightly scalded by steam, had lain down and gone to sleep with his head pillowed among some of the steward's recent purchases, and of how the cook, foraging in the twilight and starting to pick up what he thought was a boiled lobster, had nearly pulled off one of the unlucky chap's burned ears!
I sought the fo'c'sle deck for a breath of fresh air after that, and pushed my head out of the after superstructure just as a hulking cinder came winging aft before the snoring north-east gale. It was quite possible (I said to myself as I ducked inside and pulled down my eyelid in an endeavour to deposit the unwelcome fragment on my cheek) that this very cinder was one which I myself had dumped down one of the bunker chutes during our last coaling.
At any rate, I knew that, save for that lastleg skywards by way of the furnaces, I had followed the path of the coal from the collier to the funnel-top, and even a bit further. I had, therefore, no legitimate cause for resentment over the fact that it had taken to following me.
In writing some months ago on the coming of the American Army to France, I quoted the naïve words used by a French Staff Officer to describe the impression the new arrivals had made upon him. After speaking of the keenness of the American officers to learn from those who had had the experience, he concluded: "We like them very much. In fact, they have been quite a surprise. They have not displayed the least tendency to show us how to run the war. Indeed,they are not the least American!"
I do not know that I have heard a British naval officer usepreciselythe same words in voicing his relief that his American "opposite number," whom he is now beginning to meet with increasing frequency and intimacy, has not fulfilled expectations in insisting on showing the British Navy how to win the war; but that precise sentiment I heard implied many times, though, I am happy to record, less and less frequently as the favourable impression formed by those who have had opportunity of meeting the first officers from across the Atlantic, has had time to "percolate." Save on the score oftechnical training and uniform, there is very little to differentiate the American naval officer from his brother in the Army who has furnished so agreeable a surprise to his Allies in France, and there need be no fear (whatever may have been expected from those who have not had the opportunity of meeting him before) that the former will not "keep station" at sea in the same quiet unostentatious way that the latter has "fallen into step" on land.
So far, since American naval activities in the war zone have been largely limited to the operations of their fleet of destroyers off the Irish coast, the two navies have had far less opportunity to get acquainted than have the British and American armies. The liaison established at Queenstown, however, may be taken as a microcosm of the co-operation that will be established on a larger scale should the exigencies of the situation demand it. As thoroughly characteristic of the spirit in which the Americans are taking up their work in these waters, I may quote the words of an officer of one of their destroyers with whom I talked recently.
"Green as we came to the job," he said, "in comparison to their three years of hard experience of the British, our taking over here was almost like a lot of boy scouts replacing a regiment of seasoned veterans in the trenches. We were all for the job, however, and somehow we began to get results right from the get-away. Let me tell you, though, that if we had had to find out all the wrinkles of the game ourselves—ifthey had not given us the benefit of all they had been paying in ships and men for three years to learn—it would have been a far slower business for us, and a far more costly one as well. I take off my hat to the British destroyers and trawlers, and to the men who man them. I have not had a chance yet to see anything of the rest of their Navy, but if the officers and men are of the same stamp as those we have worked with here, when our capital ships come over it will be just like joining up with another American fleet."
These sentiments seem to me thoroughly typical of the spirit with which the American Navy is taking up its task in European waters, and such also was the opinion of a distinguished British Naval officer to whom I quoted them not long ago.
"I have known American Naval Officers a good many years," he said, "principally on the China and West India stations, so that, personally, I had none of the doubts about our ability to co-operate with them that may have been harboured by some of my friends who had been less fortunate than myself on that score. The fact that the average untravelled Briton has had to judge the American wholly by such specimens as seemed to him the most characteristic among those coming to this side of the water—that is, by the Cook's tourist and the money-slinging millionaire, neither of whom is in the least representative—has been responsible for our getting, as a nation, a distorted picture of you, as a nation. It was that which gave the moreconservative element in both our Army and Navy some doubts as to how we might settle down to pull in double harness.
"One of the best things about the American Naval Officer—and one that stands him in good stead at the present time—is his open-mindedness. He may have come over here firmly believing that some gun, some explosive, some system of loading or fire-control, or any of a number of other things he has perfected to the best of his experience, is better than anything else of the kind that Britain or any other nation has got. But that does not blind him in the least to the good points of the latter, and no false sentiment, pride, or conservatism will prevent the incontinent scrapping of his own long-laboured-over invention to make way for what his open mind and sterling common sense tell him is better. It is this which makes it comparatively easy for the American to do a thing which is above almost all others difficult for the Briton—to profit and take advantage of another's experience.
"An American destroyer—and the same will be true of any other ships of whatever class that may be sent over—takes its place as a unit of one of our fleets or squadrons just as easily and naturally as if a new British ship, manned by British sailors, had been commissioned, and that will go on just as long as it is necessary or advisable to increase your naval strength in European waters. Indeed, the effective smoothness of the system under which the American ships work with oursmakes one feel that—quite without realising it—we have taken the first step in the formation of what has so long been talked of as a Utopian dream—an 'International Police Force.' It is hardly the time to talk of such a consummation at this stage of things; but if it ever does eventuate, you make take it that an Anglo-Saxon naval force will be its foundation."
Because it has been impossible to tell the public really anything about American naval co-operation with the British, the historic significance of that event has been almost overlooked. As a matter of fact, however, it marks the first occasion in which the ships of one Allied nation have been practically incorporated (so far as the direction of operations are concerned) in the navy of another. Allied fleets have carried out operations together—as the French and the British at the Dardanelles, or the British and the Italians in the Adriatic—but never has the co-operation been so intimate—and, it may be added, so successful—as in the present instance.
That the British and American naval officer would "hit it off" well personally from the outset no one with any acquaintance with both of them could ever have had any doubt. As a matter of fact, indeed, there is less difference between them than between the average American and Englishman, and even that is a good deal less than most people imagine. In the first place, they come from very nearly the same classes socially (I am speaking now of the regular "R.N."and "U.S.N."), in their respective countries, and there is very little indeed to differentiate the English lad of thirteen or fourteen and the American lad of a year or two older, the one beginning his naval training at Osborne and the other at Annapolis. Differing in details though they are, the training of these two naval schools is far less divergent than that of English and American public schools and universities. That is to say, the naval schools of the two countries are aiming at precisely the same thing—the turning out of an officer who knows his business—whereas public schools and universities are working in a number of different directions.
The system of appointing the American naval cadet ensures that each year's class is selected as nearly as may be from all parts of the country. Each member of the Congress is required to make one appointment to both the naval and military academies, and, in addition to these, there are ten or more appointments at large made from Washington. In this way each State is represented in the Naval Academy according to its population. Thus New York, with, say, forty members in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate, would have forty-two nominees, while Nevada, with three members in the House and two in the Senate, would have five. A Member of Congress has his choice of making the appointment open to a competitive examination or giving it direct to any boy fulfilling the requisite requirements. Even in the latter case, however, the prospectivenominee must pass very stiff examinations calculated to establish his mental, moral, and physical fitness, and it is practically impossible for him to be pushed in simply because he has friends in high places. It is, I believe, becoming more and more the custom to resort to competitive examination, so that the boy named by each member is usually the brightest of a score or more striving for that honour from his Congressional district, which contains, roughly, a population of from two to three hundred thousand.
As nearly as the comparison can be made, the four-years' course at the Annapolis Naval Academy covers about the same ground that the British cadet covers in his two years at Osborne, the same period (since the war somewhat reduced) at Dartmouth, and his first year as a midshipman. Since the average age of entrance to Osborne is about thirteen and a half, and to Annapolis about sixteen, it is difficult to compare the entrance requirements or the courses. As the British cadet has about two and a half years the start of the American in the matter of age, it follows that the latter—to reach an equality of training, if not of rank, at twenty—must cover in four years the same ground which the former does in six and a half. This, I should say, he comes pretty near to accomplishing.
The fact that the American Navy was less than half of the size of the British, while the population from which officers could be drawnwas more than twice that of the British Isles, made it possible for Annapolis to insist on a mental and physical standard in its entrants calculated to make them equal to the very stiff years of work ahead of them. The system of naming as "alternative" the boy who passed "No. 2" in the competitive entrance examination also made it possible to weed out and replace in the first year any cadet who began to lag behind his class.
Not only was the "book" and class-room work at Annapolis a good deal stiffer than in the corresponding years at Osborne and Dartmouth, but the year was a longer one in point of work. At Osborne the cadet spent three terms of three months each, with the other three months of the year divided into his Easter, Summer, and Christmas holidays. At Annapolis there was something like nine months of work at the academy proper, with the summer months spent in cruising on a training ship.
At the end of four years—or at about the age of twenty—the American cadet, on passing the examinations, received the rank of ensign—corresponding to the British sub-lieutenant—and began his sea career as an officer. The British midshipman usually managed to qualify for his first stripe at a somewhat earlier age than his American cousin, and this start tended to increase rather than decrease as he climbed the ladder of promotion. Speaking very roughly the British lieutenant appears to average two or three years younger than his American "opposite," the lieutenant-commander three or four, the commander three to five, and the captain five to seven.
Of the training of the cadets in the British and American naval institutions, only the briefest comparison is possible here. On the physical side there is very little difference, both giving the greatest encouragement to outdoor exercise and bodily development. Each pays equal attention to aquatics—rowing, swimming, and sailing—and American football gives the Annapolis cadet the same vigorous, manly training as "rugger" does those of Osborne and Dartmouth. Baseball and cricket are more or less in the same class.
On the technical side there was also a good deal of similarity in the training, though it seems probable that the "specialisation," which is the principal differentiation between the British and American Naval Officer (who is given an "all-round" preparation), is being given more and more attention in the British schools as the necessity of turning out officers rapidly has increased during the war. The fact that it is the British rather than the American officer who is trained as a "specialist" presents a curious anomaly, for, generally speaking, the United States is, of all the nations in the world, the one where specialisation is carried to the greatest length. Yet the fact remains that it has always been the American practice not only to train the naval cadet so that he is competent ultimately to perform the duties of any officer onany ship of the Navy, but actually to require him to serve several years in each of such various capacities as engineer, navigator, gunnery, or torpedo officer.
This system gives the officer who has been "through the mill" an incomparable experience by the time he attains his captaincy, but the number of good men (who might have made most excellent specialists) who "fell by the wayside" because they were not able to stand the pace for qualifying for so great a range of duties makes one doubt if it is practicable for any nation situated otherwise than was the United States up to its entry into the present war—that is, with a huge population and a modest navy. With the development of the modern man-of-war, the increasing mastery of technical detail which such duties of those of torpedo or gunnery officer entail would seem to make it inevitable that such officers should not be required to divert their attention or energies to anything else. This fact we may confidently expect to see reflected both in the training of the cadet at Annapolis and in American naval practice before very long—perhaps even during the war.
The fact that—as was only natural—the United States Navy, when it was formed during the Revolutionary War, was modelled on the only other Navy of which the colonials had experience—the British—is responsible for many similarities in the forms and practices of the respective services to-day. The gold sleeve or shoulder stripes indicating the rank of officersare practically identical, save only that the Americans replace the British executive "curl" with a star. The American Marine even retains the silver half-globe which is so characteristic a feature of the badge of the Royal Marine of the British Navy. In manning guns, and even whole turrets, with Royal Marines, it would appear that the British Navy has progressed rather further than has the American from the time when this "anachronistic amphibian," as some one has called him, was carried principally to swarm over the rail with a cutlass when the old ships of the line closed in a death grapple. In general multifarity of duties, however, there is little to choose between this always useful "soldier-and-sailor-too" of either service.
The comparatively short term of service in the American Navy was responsible for the fact that the Yankee man-o'-war's-man was a good deal less of a "jolly Jack Tar" in appearance than his British cousin, a difference which has been accentuated since America entered the war by the necessity of an even further "dilution" of landsmen. The practice of allowing the American sailor to wear a sweater and toboggan cap, except on "dress" occasions, has also tended to make him smack less of the sea than the flowing-collared sailor-man who will be performing similar duties on a British ship. Since the fighting of the modern warship is about 90 per cent. "mechanical" and 10 per cent. "nautical," however, the lack of the "Yo-heave-ho" touch in the Yankee sailor-man is by no means in his disfavour. On the contrary, indeed, the very fact that he has only just come to sea may indicate that he has spent all the more time in mastering the intricacies of machinery and electricity and the other things which enter so much into the efficiency of the present-day fighting-ship.
To quote my American naval friend again, both navies have many things that are different—in ships, guns, engines, executive system, victualling—and each may feel a natural pride in its own things. There is undoubtedly much in each navy the other can profit by, but the United States Navy is bearing in mind that everything new the British Navy has to offer it has been tried and proved by long and hard experience, while all the new things it is able to offer the British Navy have only been put to peace-time tests. But now that American ships are having practical experience, that is being altered rapidly.
Perhaps the most gratifying tribute I have heard paid to the American Battle Squadron which has been for many months incorporated in and working with the Grand Fleet was an unconscious one.
"How are the Americans getting on?" I asked an officer of the Commander-in-Chief's staff a few days ago.
"The Americans?" he repeated. "Oh, you mean the 'Xth B. S.' They have merged so completely into the Grand Fleet that we long ago ceased to think of them as anything but a part of ourselves. Indeed, that's just what they have become—a part of ourselves. They're doing their part. I couldn't say more for them."
The world was a good deal impressed when, just after the German offensive started last March, President Wilson, acting on General Pershing's suggestion, agreed to the brigading of the American troops in France with theBritish and French armies until such time as they were in sufficient strength to form an army of their own. It was a wise action from the military point of view alone, but doubly so in giving our allies so unmistakable example of the spirit in which America was entering the common fight.
It is characteristic of the essential difference between land and sea operations that the announcement of a similar sacrifice of national pride in the furtherance of Allied unity—this time on the part of the American Navy, and antedating the other by several months—should have to be withheld from the public until the significance of it was largely overshadowed by the more dramatic conditions under which the decision to brigade the American troops with the Allied armies was taken. Yet it is a fact that, until the arrival of the American battleships, white with brine of the Atlantic across which they had ploughed their way, last winter, never before in history had the warships of one nation endeavoured to co-operate with those of another save as a separate fleet. Never, indeed, up to that time, had such a consummation been deemed practicable.
But the American Navy Department and—especially—the distinguished Admiral appointed to the command of the first squadron to be sent to European waters, realising that nothing but national pride, and certain service practices which they felt sure Yankee adaptability would be equal to modifying, were the only obstaclesto an arrangement which could not but add incalculably to the weight they were throwing into the balance, decided—quite on their own initiative and without any pressure whatever from the British—that all American battleships should be incorporated into the Grand Fleet instead of operating as a distinct American force. From that time on, to all intents and purposes, it was as though so many new British units—fresh from the yards of the Tyne or the Clyde—had been added to the Grand Fleet. The American ships still flew the Stars and Stripes, and there were no changes in pay, uniform, discipline, nor in such technical practices as effected the efficiency of the ship as a fighting unit. But in every particular involving relations with the Grand Fleet as a whole, British practice was and is the rule. Everything that any British ship or squadron does devolves likewise upon every American ship and squadron, this extending from such things as providing work-parties for road-making or other jobs on the beach, to sallying forth on one of the great concerted sweeps through the North Sea in which the bulk of the floating might of the whole world is on the move.
One American battleship which, crossing the Atlantic alone and arriving at Base only a few hours before the Grand Fleet was ordered to sea on what at the moment looked like the hottest kind of a Hun scent, made a great hit with the sport-loving British by replenishing her bunkers in a wildly-rushed coaling, and raisingsteam in time to get under weigh, and swing into line with her sisters who had been grooming themselves for just such an event for many weeks. The next morning I was standing on the bridge of a British super-dreadnought with an historic name, when the Admiral read out a signal from the Fleet Flagship, which made it appear likely that an action with the German High Sea Fleet was but a matter of a few hours. Walking out to the end of the bridge, he turned his glasses back to where, steaming hard in line ahead, the American ships were coming up in perfect station on our starboard quarter. Running his glasses back along the line, he rested his glance for a moment on the last ship.
"There's the good oldTexas," he said, with an affectionate smile, "not an inch out of station, and steaming with the best of 'em. You'd never think to see her that she was bucking the swells of the Atlantic at this time yesterday morning. My word, what a stroke of luck for her if shedoeshappen to stumble, in her first twenty-four hours with the Grand Fleet, into what the rest of us have been waiting four years for!"
It turned out to be the same old disappointment after all, this time as so many others, but the plucky bid theTexasmade for a chance of participating in "Der Tag" pleased the British mightily, and won her at the outset a high place in their esteem.
That the newcomers would have much to learn from the three- and four-year veterans of the Grand Fleet was only to be expected, andright eagerly they set themselves out to master the things that can only be taught by experience. But the exchange of ideas was not entirely one-sided. One day I heard the Gunnery Lieutenant of my ship speaking with great enthusiasm of the American telephone system, and of the astonishing speed with which the "Yanks" loaded their turret guns. The Commander came back from U.S.S.New Yorkloud in the praise of the quality of the American paints, which he claimed gave a surface much more easily kept clean than the similar grades provided in the British ships. The swift, smart American launches always evoked favourable comment, and even the strange-looking "bird-cage" masts won occasional converts. Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is the large and increasing number of British officers that one hears speaking sympathetically, and even approvingly, of the total abstinence in force in the American ships. The fact that the officers of the latter are practically unanimous in declaring that they would never favour going back to the old regime has made a good deal of an impression on the British, and more and more frequently I hear the older Royal Naval officers saying that they wished they had the same anti-liquor rules in force in their own ships.
In these and a score of other similar things one has evidence every day that, while the British Fleet is a constant inspiration to the Americans, the coming of the latter has not been without its "tonic" effects on the former.
Social entertainment between ship and ship is one of the features of British naval life that has been most conspicuous by its absence since the war began, and perhaps the highest compliment that could be paid the Americans was that the Grand Fleet did not consider it necessary to make any exception to the general practice in their case. Senior and Junior officers of ships that chanced to be moored conveniently near each other lunched and dined back and forth, but no more or no less than if the newcomers had been English rather than American. There was no drinking of high-sounding toasts, and the nearest thing to formality in this respect I recall was the proposing the health of "The President," following that of "The King," with the port. For the rest, when one of our Latin allies could not possibly resist clinking glasses to "America," "The Entente," "Victory," and no end of similar toasts, the Briton contented himself with an unobtrusive "Cheerio" or "Chin-chin."
But what these little unpremeditated "inter-wardroom" affairs lacked in formality they made up in geniality. One of the most memorable "evenings" I ever spent was that following a dinner in a certain famous light cruiser of the Australian Navy, at which four officers of U.S.S.Wyoming(which chanced to be moored in the next line) were present. There was a concert by the ship's company that evening, and after a delectable hour and a half of Anglo-Australian chaff and harmony had been brought to a close by the playing of "God Save the King" and the "StarSpangled Banner," the officers returned to the wardroom for a quiet hour with their pipes. The thing started, I believe, when somebody wound up the gramophone with a "Chu-Chin-Chow" record on it, and everybody joined in on the chorus. Then it transpired that the American guests showed unmistakable evidence of "team-work" in their harmony, and presently the others fell out and left the quartette singing alone. Two or three strange new "jazzy rags," which had not yet won their way to popular favour on this side of the Atlantic, gave way to "Mississippi" and "Tennessee" and the classic melody of "I've Been Working on the Railroad." Finishing up with a flourish in a snappily executed bit of "buck-and-wing-ing," the guests then insisted that they had occupied the centre of the stage long enough, and demanded that the next round of the show should be British.
The hosts, affirming that they could not think of producing an anti-climax by following on after so finished a musical performance as that just concluded, said they would nevertheless endeavour to provide their share of entertainment by playing a game of "chair polo." This spirited competition quickly resolved itself into a general rough-and-tumble, out of which the fatherly Major of Marines, who was the senior officer of the guests, only managed to keep one of the young American Lieutenants by reminding him that it was not becoming that an officer and gentleman should break furniture outside of his own ship.
When all the British officers had fought themselves into a state of collapse, a hulking young midshipman who was roosting precariously on two legs of the lounging chair under which the Commander was imprisoned, gave vent to his exultation by taking in a lungful of air and expending it in the blood-curdling Maori war-cry, which he had learned in his New Zealand home before he joined the Navy. That gave the visitors a chance to get in the running again, and, putting their heads close together and beating out the rhythm with their fists, they fairly started the rivets on the wardroom ceiling with the thunderous bark of the Navy yell. The Maori war-whoop was like the chirping of a cricket in comparison. Wide-eyed with wonder and admiration, the British officers relaxed the death grips in which they had been holding each other, and gathered near to see at close range how the big noise was made. The Gunnery Lieutenant slipped away for a moment, presently to reappear wearing his "ear-defenders." "Always use 'em when the big stuff is firing," he explained; "when do we start the next run?"
Nothing would do but that the officers of H.M.S. "——" should be taught the Yankee Navy yell. A class was formed then and there, and lessons were in full swing an hour later when the Officer of the Watch poked his head timidly inside the door to announce that the boat for the American officers had been standing-by for twenty minutes, but that he had been waiting for a pause in the singing to report it.He was a serious-looking little Sub, that Officer of the Watch, and I never could make quite sure whether he thought it was really singing (perhaps a new kind of Yankee ragtime) he was interrupting or not.
Ducking under hammocks in which restive would-be sleepers were stirring, we filed up the ladder and came out into the frosty air of the quarterdeck to speed the parting guests. Good-nights were spoken softly in deference to the Captain, whose sleeping cabin was just beneath our feet, and the four cloaked officers tip-toed gently down the gangway and aboard their waiting launch. Then the Commander passed a quietly spoken order down the line along the rail. "Ready now; altogether. One—two—three!"
With the sudden roar of a full gun salvo, the Navy yell boomed out on the still air and went rolling forth across the still waters to set strange echoes chattering in the distant hills. A sudden surge of quickly suppressed laughter floated back to us from the receding launch, but the visiting officers were on their good behaviour once they were "out in the open" again, and the challenge was not taken up.
The Commander was chuckling as he bade me good night in the half-darkness of the wardroom flat. "There can't have been such another yell as that heard by these quiet waters since they were first ploughed by the galleys of the old Norse Vikings," he said with a laugh. "I'd really like to know just how many of the fifty orsixty thousand men of the Grand Fleet awakened by it knew to what Navy that 'Nav-eee!' they heard referred to. Not that it makes much matter, though, now that we're all one."
The British naval officer, sapient of many ports and peoples, had a pretty clear idea that in the American Naval Officer he was going to find an ally who, in spite of a number of superficial differences from himself, would still be a deal easier to act in intimate co-operation with than any of those with whom he had been fighting up to the time of the entry of the United States into the war. With the British sailor it was different. Only a few of him had ever met any American bluejackets, and these meetings—for the most part confined to the bars and bunds of Shanghai, Hongkong, Singapore, and the other ports of the Far East—had not always been of a nature calculated to be promotive of international amity. The American Jackie was chiefly remembered by the British for the softness of a speech that belied the hardness of a fist, and an astonishing and unaccountable penchant for scattering Mexican dollars from rickshaws for coolies to scramble for.
It was a good deal as a brine-pickled old British man-o'-wars-man of many years' service said to me a few days ago. "We never had nochance to know the Yanks afore the present, sir. We was allus eyin' each other distrustful like when we was in the same ports, and we was never gettin' much closer than the length o' a bar apart. Result was that we only seed the few things in them that was diff'rent from what we was, and they likewise wi' us. And o' course we never spotted the things in which we was just alike. All that I rec'lect o' the Yanks we used to run into on the China Station was that they was dressed diff'rent from us, talked diff'rent, and even swore diff'rent. The way they cussed struck me most of all. It was so earnest like. That was the thing I remembered 'em best for—as the blokes wot cussed like they was sayin' their prayers."
And so it was that the British and American bluejackets remembered each other for their differences rather than for the traits they had in common. Naturally, the picture was a distorted one on both sides. But when, with the coming of the American ships to European waters, the first chance to get together and become really acquainted was offered, each soon began to see the other in the proper perspective, and from the very first they have become better and better friends with every day that went by.
A good many British sailors have told me during the last few months of the increasing ties of friendship and kinship that were knitting between them and the "Yanks," but perhaps some extracts from an article which has justappeared in the little monthly magazine published by the Lower Deck of one of the battleships of the Grand Fleet will give the best idea of the way things have gone in this respect. It was signed "Bluejacket," and I have learned that the writer is a Seaman Gunner who, like the great majority of his mates, never met any of his cousins from across the Atlantic until the American Battleship Squadron joined the Grand Fleet last winter.
"We had all heard a good deal of the Yankee Fleet," it begins, "and a few of us had seen Yankee ships before in our voyages abroad; but to the most of us their manners and customs were a sealed book; and so many curious glances were cast toward their battleships, after their arrival to take their place beside us, just to catch a glimpse of an American sailor. We all had our various ideas of what they were really like, and I am giving away no secret when I say that we did not expect them to come up to our standard, or to be very much our own kind. This was inevitable owing to the feeling fostered by some sections of the British press during the preceding years of the war in which America had been neutral. Consequently we were more than a little surprised on meeting them ashore for the first time to find them such very good fellows. Perhaps the thing that surprised us most about them was to find that there was less difference between the English that they talked than there was between that of the Cockney and the Scotchman, or the Cornishman and the Yorkshireman, or the Welshman and the Lancashireman. That is to say, it was easier for the run of us to understand them than it was for us to understand each other. But the thing that we liked best about them was the quiet way they had of speaking. This, I must admit again, was also a great surprise to us, for the Yankee of our funny papers and music-halls was invariably very loud-mouthed and boastful. They had some rather fearful and wonderful slang, it is true, but the most of it was so expressive that we had not the least difficulty, first, in following it, and then beginning to adopt it for our own use. For instance, it was as easy to see that 'Some class, those shooting irons on theLizzie,' referred to the 15-inch guns of theQueen Elizabeth, as it was to see that 'pretty nifty with his hot footing, hey bo?' referred to the way Charley Chaplin was kicking out with his feet in the movie (there, I have dropped into a 'Yankeeism' myself! Nothing could be more catching) at the Y.M.C.A. hut. We have probably been borrowing more of their language than they have of ours so far, for many of the Yankeeisms seem to go right to the spot so much better than ordinary English.
"Our first meetings on shore got on so well that we decided to get up some kind of a game with them. It was out of the question for us to try to play their baseball or football, just as it was for them to tackle our cricket. But we had heard that one of their ships had been having a try at our Association football, and on thestrength of this we sent them a challenge for a game of 'Soccer.' The fact that they jumped at the chance to take us on at a game at which they had practically no experience at is the best evidence of the kind of sporting spirit we have found the Yanks showing about everything.
"When the time for the game came there is no denying that we began to get rather nervous; not because we were not sure we were going to give them a licking (for ours is the champion Soccer team of the Grand Fleet), but because we weren't quite sure what we were going up against. (There goes another Yankeeism, just because it puts the thing better than any words in our own language.) We had read of what a shambles the field at an American football game was, and of how the men fought in armour, like the knights of the crusades, and of how each team was attended by its own stretcher-bearers and casualty clearing station. Frankly, we were afraid that they might take the occasion to 'Yankefy' Soccer along these lines. As a precautionary measure, we made a point of getting shore leave for just as many men as possible, so as to be sure of being in sufficient force to back up our boys if it came to a fight for life. Indeed, we were much relieved to find on landing that the British bluejackets outnumbered the American by three to one, and that there were no evidences of hospital arrangements.
"Of course we beat them, for our team had years' experience of the game where theirs had days, but the game was keenly contested all theway, and the score of six to one in our favour was by no means as one-sided as we could have piled up against many of the British ships of the Grand Fleet. There was no sentiment about it, either. We licked them as bad as we could. Their training in the Yankee game had made them quick to master the main points of the British, and the result was that they had made a progress in the latter which must have been just about a record considering only one or two of them had ever seen Soccer before. We heard them cursing each other a bit now and then in an effort to stiffen up their defence, but so far as we were concerned they displayed nothing but the cleanest kind of sportsmanship. By their showing on this occasion we were prepared to hear, as we did shortly, that this same Yankee team had won games of Soccer from two or three of the British battleships and battle cruisers. Nothing but their greater interest in baseball, which they were able to take up in the spring, has prevented the Yanks from turning out a football team that would have been a real contender for the Grand Fleet championship, and even as it is they have given us an example of their adaptability, quick-wittedness, and sportsmanship that has won the admiration and respect of everybody.
"But it was not till the long days of summer came and shore leave was granted more liberally that we had a chance to really form friendships with our new allies. Perhaps it was baseball that helped us more than anything elsein getting acquainted. The Commander-in-Chief having provided suitable grounds, a baseball league was formed of the teams of the several American battleships, and from the very start these games provided a very strong counter-attraction to our own football matches. There might be a half-dozen football games in progress, but the moment the wild yelling from down in front of the pavilion told that a baseball game was under weigh all the spectators melted away at once, and sometimes even the players themselves chucked their hands in and went over to see the antics of the Yanks. It was these antics—rooting, I think they call it, though I don't quite know why—that attracted us at first, but we were not long in finding out what they were driving at, and really following the progress of the game. Certainly none of us had ever seen the ball handled with such dexterity, both in the way it was caught and the way it was thrown, and the best cricket seemed dull and tame in comparison. We especially admired the quickness of the players on their feet, both in fielding and running round the bases. Few British bluejackets could show such speed, and we have decided the Yankees are faster because they are all shorter service men than we are, and so have had less time to get slow and beefy through ship life. We hope to make our beef and bulk tell against them in boxing and rowing. They tell us that it takes ten years to make a good baseball player, and we can well believe it. As none of us are yet ready to acknowledge thepossibility of the war lasting that long, it is hardly likely that we shall try to turn out any teams with the idea of nosing the Yanks out of the baseball championship of the Grand Fleet, but all the same we are fully determined to tackle the game for the game's sake, and to play it among ourselves as we get a chance. The British matelot never did have the patience to play cricket, but baseball has so much that cricket lacks that it is by no means impossible that he may take to it in time, just as our Canadian cousins have. In the mean time our old song which goes 'We'll ramp and we'll roar like true British sailors' will have to be sung, 'We'll ramp and we'll roar like Yankee baseballers,' for there is no question that they can out-ramp and out-roar us with several cables'-lengths to spare.
"The baseball games have given us a welcome chance to show our friendship for the American bluejackets. It is the custom to provide each member of a British shore-leave party with tickets good for two pints of beer at the Recreation Club. The Yank ships, being teetotallers, did not do this, and so the poor chaps would have had to get on without any beer if we had not come to their rescue. Soon it became quite the regular thing for a British sailor to provide his Yankee chum with half his beer-tickets, and, as many of the days were sweltering hot, you may believe they were appreciated. As the present beer we get does not contain enough alcohol to intoxicate a fly,American mothers need have no fear that there is anything in this action calculated to lead their sailor boys astray.
"I need hardly say that the Yanks have reciprocated every time they had a chance. I was having tea at the Naval Club a few days, and, having neglected to bring any sugar ashore from the ship, I was about to do the best I could without it, when an American sailor reached over from the next table and handed me his ration, saying that he had come provided with an extra one for just that purpose. And it was fine white sugar, too. I have seen the same thing happen a number of times. The Yanks seem to be allowed an extra lot of sugar and sweets to make up for not having grog. They tell me that they don't miss the latter very badly, and I can't say that they seem any the worse for not having it. Perhaps that is the one thing that we have worried most about since the Yankees came—as to whether or not their example would cause the British ships to 'go dry' too. Who can say? Stranger things have happened, but the change will hardly come during the war anyhow.
"The few weeks' sport at this Base gave the men a chance to meet in such a way that they could form real friendships, and I know of a number of instances where British sailors have asked Yankees to visit them in their homes if ever there is a chance that the leaves work out favourable to that arrangement. We found that we had a great many things in common with them; so much so that, writing some weeksafter these meetings, it seems awkward to speak of them as Yanks at all, they have become so much part and parcel of ourselves.
"I cannot close this without mentioning an amusing incident which occurred to a messmate of mine. This chap was told off for patrol duty at the railway station, and, as was usual, had a Yankee sailor as a partner, the latter being provided with a small truncheon, according to their custom. The British lad, who was a good deal of a youngster, got interested in the stick and asked many questions, to all of which the American replied with the greatest good humour. Among other things, he said that the truncheon was 'loaded,' and that it was used for quieting obstreperous sailors. After this my friend kept his distance, and on returning to his mess explained to an attentive crowd all the happenings of the afternoon, ending up by saying that he took no chances with that 'loaded gun' stick, as he was afraid it might go off by mistake. It appears that he actually thought that a 'loaded' stick meant one that 'went off' when a man was hit with it. You may be sure that we lost no time in passing the joke on to the Yanks, who appear to be enjoying it quite as much as we have. Indeed, perhaps the surest sign of the good solid base our friendship is built on is the fact that it has long ago reached the 'joking' stage—the one at which we both feel quite free to throw aside 'company manners' and 'rag' each other without fear of being misunderstood or hurting any one's feelings. And that, let metell you, means that we've at last got out a sheet-anchor that ought to keep the barque of our common friendship head-to-wind through any storm that is ever likely to threaten to swamp it."
I do not think there is much that I need add to this naïve but comprehensive statement of the way in which the Yankee bluejacket has impressed his fellows of the British Navy. The life of the Grand Fleet is a strenuous one, and at times many weeks may go by in which there is no opportunity for the men to foregather ashore. How well these rare opportunities have been used by the British and American sailors to become acquainted is evidenced by the frequency with which the officers doing the ship's censoring come across letters from one to the other, and the cordiality of the feeling which is springing up may be judged by the fact that the commonest form of address is "Dear Chum." The friendships which are growing between the thousands of Americans and Britons who are holding the seas to-day will be of incalculable influence in strengthening the bonds of international amity between the two nations upon whom most of the responsibility will rest in determining the future of civilization.
The scroll of human experience has been unrolling at rather a dizzy rate for both theAmerican soldier and sailor during the last year; but it has seemed to me to be the latter—probably because he has somewhat more time to "sit and think" than the former—that has gone the farthest in the orderly pigeon-holing of his impressions. All the spirit of the soldier's being has been concentrated on his preparation for "licking the Boche." In mind and body he is fitting himself for his grim task, and his outlook on life and things generally is not uncoloured by the red mist that is deepening before his eyes as the time of his big moment approaches. With the sailor it is different. Although, first and last, the part that he is playing and will play in winning through is every bit as important as that of the soldier, his hate of the Hun is rather more impersonal, and he is less inclined to have his moments of "seeing red" than is the Yankee soldier. It is this fact that has made the American sailor a rather more detached and unbiased observer of the things the war drama has unrolled before him than is the soldier.
"How do things look to you after a year of real war?" I asked a tall youth in blue jeans and a grey armless sweater whom I found tinkering with the sights of the forecastle gun of the destroyer in which I chanced to be out with for a few days at the time. The question was merely an ingratiating attempt to get acquainted on my part, and was ventured with no expectation of drawing a serious answer. I was not as familiar then as I have become since with the materialthey are making the young Yankee sailor of, however. He turned on me a keen eye, with wrinkles at the corners which I was quite right in surmising had come there through gazing at heat-waves dancing along broad horizons long before he had squinted down the sight of a naval gun. My diagnosis of "Texas cowboy" only missed the truth by the difference between that and an "Oklahoma oil driller, with a 'Varsity education and a ranch of his own."
He leaned back easily with an arm over the gun-breech (where a British bluejacket under similar circumstances would have stiffened at once to attention), and yet there was nothing familiar or disrespectful in his attitude. "It looks to me like two or three things," he said after a moment of wrinkling his tanned brow as he collected his thoughts. "It looks to me as though these waters hereabouts were not going to be exactly a happy hunting-ground for the U-boat now that we're beginning to savy the game good and proper. That's one thing. Another is, that it's beginning to look as if they're waking up to the fact in the States that to call a man 'politician' is one degree worse than to call him a ---- ——. It took them a year or two of war to learn that in England, and we didn't profit much by their example. Another thing—it looks like Americans—or at least those of us as have come across to this side—are going to have a fair chance to discover that the natives of these little islands are more or less the same kind of animals the Yanks are after all. We'venever had that chance in the last hundred and forty years. Instead, we've been taught from our cradles to nurse a grudge that was really wiped out when we licked them—or such forces as they could send across then—and set up business on our own account in '76. And one more thing. It looks as if Americans were at last getting off their blinkers in the matter of the Irish; that they are beginning to understand that these—but, excuse me, sir" (he turned and started adjusting the sighting mechanism again), "I just saw the Captain come up on the bridge, and I don't like to swear too freely in his hearing. And a man can't talk about this end of Ireland—or leastways about the way it's acted in the war—without swearing."
These offhand observations come pretty near to epitomising the several salient ideas that have been crystallising in the mind of the American sailor in the course of his year or more of active service in the war. If he is in a destroyer or submarine operating against the U-boat he knows full well what has been done in turning the little neck of the Atlantic where he works into what may well be termed a "marine hell" for the pirates. If he is in one or the other of these branches of the service, too, the fact that he has based in a South of Ireland port has given him a liberal education in the affairs of that "disthreshful country" and stirred in him the deepest abomination of Sinn Fein, all it stands for, and all who stand for it. A growing impatience and distrust of allprofessional politicians is common to the officers and men of all the American ships on this side, and bodes as hopefully for the future as does a similar feeling that is becoming increasingly evident in both the British Army and Navy.
But most profound of all the emotions stirred in the breast of the American sailor by the war and the new knowledge the war has brought him is undoubtedly his awakening sympathy and admiration for the British and Great Britain. The picture the most of him brought over of the Briton was a sort of hazy composite built up of what his school histories told him about George the Third's soldiers, and of what he himself had seen of the Briton—as represented on the American stage and in the funny papers. If he was a man of two or three enlistments—and these, because of the great dilution of new men which has become imperative with the expansion of the Navy, are not encountered very often—the effect of the composite was heightened by a picture of the British bluejacket as the American had met him on the waterfront of this or that foreign port. It goes without saying that the incarnation of that kind of a composite didn't seem a very promising individual for the Yankee sailor to make friends with. This creature of fancy was a male, of course. What the female of the species was he had an even hazier idea, and that there was really nothing to speak of to differentiate her from the girl, sister, or mother he had left behind him he never dreamed. Considering that this is the way things looked to him at theoutset—and the picture is not in the least exaggerated—one cannot but feel that the American sailor has made most gratifying progress in correcting his perspective in a comparatively limited time and with few opportunities.
The men of the American battleships of the Grand Fleet—always on guard at its isolated base, and able to grant scant and infrequent leave to any one serving in it—have had less chance to see the country and its people than have their mates of the destroyers and submarines, whose bases have been more convenient to England and with chances of leave turning up rather oftener. Their main, almost their only, point of contact, therefore, has been the British bluejacket. Everything considered, perhaps there could not have been a better one. No finer, and yet more fairly characteristic, cross-section of the British people could be revealed than that shown by the personnel of the Royal Navy, from stoker or seaman to Commander-in-Chief. There is no class by which the Briton himself should be prouder to be judged.