No one knows how the title of "The Trade" came to be applied to the
Submarine Service. Some say that the cruisers invented it because they
pretend that submarine officers look like unwashed chauffeurs. Others
think it sprang forth by itself, which means that it was coined by the
Lower Deck, where they always have the proper names for things.
Whatever the truth, the Submarine Service is now "the trade"; and if
you ask them why, they will answer: "What else could you call it? The
Trade's 'the trade,' of course."
It is a close corporation; yet it recruits its men and officers from
every class that uses the sea and engines, as well as from many
classes that never expected to deal with either. It takes them; they
disappear for a while and return changed to their very souls, for the
Trade lives in a world without precedents, of which no generation has
had any previous experience--a world still being made and enlarged
daily. It creates and settles its own problems as it goes along, and
if it cannot help itself no one else can. So the Trade lives in the
dark and thinks out inconceivable and impossible things which it
afterwards puts into practice.
It keeps books, too, as honest traders should. They are almost as bald
as ledgers, and are written up, hour by hour, on a little sliding
table that pulls out from beneath the commander's bunk. In due time
they go to my Lords of the Admiralty, who presently circulate a few
carefully watered extracts for the confidential information of the
junior officers of the Trade, that these may see what things are done
and how. The juniors read but laugh. They have heard the stories, with
all the flaming detail and much of the language, either from a chief
actor while they perched deferentially on the edge of a mess-room
fender, or from his subordinate, in which case they were not so
deferential, or from some returned member of the crew present on the
occasion, who, between half-shut teeth at the wheel, jerks out what
really happened. There is very little going on in the Trade that the
Trade does not know within a reasonable time. But the outside world
must wait until my Lords of the Admiralty release the records. Some of
them have been released now.