passion for the beauty and the mystery of the sea with which some
good spirit endowed me in my cradle. I was born in one of the most
historic of New England seacoast towns where brine was anciently said
to flow through the veins of the inhabitants. On midsummer days the
fierce heat distils from the cracked, caked mud of tidal meadows the
clean, salty smell of the unsullied sea; dark ships, trailing far
behind them long, dissolving plumes of smoke, weave in and out
between the tawny, whale-backed islands of the bay, and tame little
sea birds almost the colour of the shingle run along at the edge of
the in-coming tide. So I admit a bias for the service of the sea.
Does the Navy demand as much of the sailor as the Army does of the
soldier? A vexed question. The Army, comparing grimly its own
casualty lists with the Navy's occasional roll sometimes imagines
naturally enough that the sailor lives, as the old hymn has it, "on
flowery beds of ease." As a whole there is no denying that living
conditions are far better in the naval service, though much depends
on the boat to which the sailor is assigned. A soldier in the
trenches sleeps in his clothes, so does a sailor on a destroyer or a
patrol boat, and I do not believe that I felt much more comfortable
at the end of a long trip in an old destroyer during which the vessel
rolled, pitched, tossed, careened, stood on her head, sat on her tail
and buckled than I did after a week or so at the front. Certainly,
there was little to choose between the overcrowded living quarters of
the sailors and a decent "dug-out." True, the "Toto," alias
greyback, alias "Cootie" or his occasional but less famous accomplice
the "crimson rambler" does not infest a Navy ship. How many times
have I not heard Army folk say in heartfelt tones, "Those Navy people
can keep _clean_." But a truce to the Cootie. Much more has been
made of him than he deserves. During the first six months of the war
the creature was in evidence, but after the hostilities began to
limit themselves to the trench swathe, and this localizing war made
possible a stable system of hospitals, cantonments and baths, the
Cootie became as rare as a day in June and to have such guest was an
indication of abysmally bad luck or personal uncleanliness.
Moreover, a little gasoline begged from a lorry driver and sprinkled
on one's clothes confers unconditional immunity. Consider the crew
of a submarine. They do not have to splash about in a gulley of
smelly mud the consistency of thick soup, or wander down alleyways of
red brown mud, so cheesy that it sticks to the boots till one no
longer lifts feet from the ground, but shapeless, heavy, thrice
cussed lumps of mire. No one has yet risen to sing the epic of the
mud of France; yet 'tis the soul of the war. The submarine sailors
are spared the mud, but they live in a sealed cylinder into which
sunlight does not penetrate, live in the close atmosphere of a
garage; they can not get exercise or change clothes. A submarine
crew that has had a hard time of it looks quite as worn out as
soldiers just out of battle and their colour is far worse. And if
there is a more heroic service than this submarine patrol, I should
like to know of it.
And now the army in me rises to protest. "I admit," says the
military voice, "that service on ships may be a confounded sight more
disagreeable than I had imagined, but the sailor has a chance when he
gets to port of changing his uniform, whilst a poor lad of a soldier
must fight, eat, and sleep in the same old uniform, and must limit
his changes to a change of underclothes."
True, oh military spirit. Civilian, and thou, too, oh sailor, do you
know what it is to be confined, to be wedded, without jest, "till
death do us part" to _one_ suit. One faithful, persistent, necessary
uniform and _one_ only. Two-thirds of the joy of permission is the
pleasure of getting out of a dirty, stale, besweated uniform. Heaven
bless, Heaven shower a Niagara of happiness on those kindly ladies
who sent us supplies of socks and jerseys! Don't be content to knit
Johnny socks and a sweater, keep on knitting him a number of them,
and send them over at intervals. The dandies of a section used to
leave extra clothes in villages behind the lines. Alas, sometimes,
the group, after service "_aux tranchées_" was not marched back to
the same village, and it was difficult to get permission to visit the
other village, even were it near. Such expedients, however, are for
luxurious times. Quite often there are no habitable villages for
miles behind the lines, or else the civilian inhabitants have been
ruthlessly warned away. In such circumstances there is no clean
cache of clothes to be left behind in Madame's closet. But the
sailor ... though he returns as grimy as a printers' devil and as
bearded as a comic tramp, there is always a clean suit of "liberty
blues" in his bag, and to-morrow, clad in the handsomest of all naval
uniforms, he will be found ashore, breaking fair British or Irish
hearts.
I have tried to show that in the judgment of an ex-soldier, the
difference between the life of a sailor in a fighting ship and the
life of a soldier in a fighting regiment is by no means as great as
it has been imagined. The army, I suppose, will grumble at such a
pronunciamento. Let an objector, then, try being a lookout man all
winter long on a destroyer ... or try firing a while. All is not
quite purgatorial even at the front. Most army men know of quiet
places along the line held on our side by rubicund, wine-bibbing,
middle-aged French "territoriaux," _bons pères de famille_ who show
you pictures of Etienne and Maurice; and garrisoned on the enemy's
border by fat old Huns who want very, very much to get home to their
great pipe and steaming sauerkraut. In such places each side
apologizes for the bad taste of their supporting artillery, whilst
grenade throwing is regarded as the bottom level of viciousness.
Once in a while people die there of old age, gout, or chronic liver.
No one is ever killed. Such "ententes cordiales" were far more
frequent than those behind the line have ever suspected. On the
other hand, some twenty miles down the trench swathe there may be a
hillock constantly contested, a strategic point which burns up the
lives of men as casually as the sustaining of a fire consumes
faggots. Now it is the quick, merciful bullet in the head, now the
hot, whizzing éclat of a high explosive, now the earthquake of the
subterranean mine. But after all, a mine at sea is no more gentle
than one on land, and to have a mine exploded under him is perhaps
the eventuality which a soldier fears more than anything else. On
land, the thundering release of a giant breath from out of the earth,
a monstrous pall of fragments of soil, stones, and dust ... perhaps
of fragments more ghastly, at sea, a thundering pound, a column of
water which seems to stand upright for a second or two and then falls
crashing on whatever is left of the vessel. _Quelle monde!_
There is a distinct difference between the psychology of the soldier
and that of the sailor. A soldier of any army is sure to be drilled,
and drilled, and drilled again till he becomes what he ought to be, a
cog in an immense machine scientifically designed for the release of
violence; a sailor, drilled scientifically enough but not so
machinally, preserves some of the ancient freedom of the sea. Then,
too, the soldier with his bayonet is a fighting force; the sailor,
though prepared for it, himself rarely fights, but works a fighting
mechanism, ... the ship. The battleship X may sink the cruiser Y,
but there is rarely a "_corps a corps_" such as takes place for
instance in a disputed shell crater. Thus removed from the baser
brutalities of war, the sailor never reveals that vein of Berserker
savagery which soldiers will often reveal in a conquered province.
As a class, sailors are the best-natured, good-hearted souls in the
world. Rough some may be, some may be scamps, but brutal, never.
Moreover, living under a discipline easier to bear than the soldiers,
Jack has not the sullen streaks that overtake betimes men under arms.
Of course, he grumbles, enlisted men are not normal if they don't
grumble, but Jack's grumbling is as nothing compared to the fierce,
smothered hate for things in general which every soldier sometimes
feels.
I would follow the sea, because I am a lover of the mystery and
beauty of the sea, and because my comrades would be sailormen. I
would knock at the Navy's door because, after all is said and done,
the naval power is the ultima ratio of this titanic affair. I have
seen many of the great scenes of this war, among them Verdun on the
first night of the historic battle, but nothing that I saw on land
impressed me as did my first view of the British Grand Fleet in its
northern harbour, ... the dark ships, the hollow ships, rulers of the
past, rulers of the future, unconquered and unconquerable.
H.B.B.
The Parson Capen House,
Topsfield, 1919.
END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N.Y.