"And--about this Jutland fight?" I hinted, not for the first time.
"Oh, that was just a fight. There was more of it than any other fight,
I suppose, but I expect all modern naval actions must be pretty much
the same."
"But what does one _do_--how does one feel?" I insisted, though I knew
it was hopeless.
"One does one's job. Things are happening all the time. A man may be
right under your nose one minute--serving a gun or something--and the
next minute he isn't there."
"And one notices that at the time?"
"Yes. But there's no time to keep _on_ noticing it. You've got to
carry on somehow or other, or your show stops. I tell you what one
_does_ notice, though. If one goes below for anything, or has to pass
through a flat somewhere, and one sees the old wardroom clock ticking,
or a photograph pinned up, or anything of that sort, one notices
_that_. Oh yes, and there was another thing--the way a ship seemed to
blow up if you were far off her. You'd see a glare, then a blaze, and
then the smoke--miles high, lifting quite slowly. Then you'd get the
row and the jar of it--just like bumping over submarines. Then, a long
while after p'raps, you run through a regular rain of bits of burnt
paper coming down on the decks--like showers of volcanic ash, you
know." The door of the operating-room seemed just about to open, but
it shut again.
"And the Huns' gunnery?"
"That was various. Sometimes they began quite well, and went to pieces
after they'd been strafed a little; but sometimes they picked up
again. There was one Hun-boat that got no end of a hammering, and it
seemed to do her gunnery good. She improved tremendously till we sank
her. I expect we'd knocked out some scientific Hun in the controls,
and he'd been succeeded by a man who knew how."
It used to be "Fritz" last year when they spoke of the enemy. Now it
is Hun or, as I have heard, "Yahun," being a superlative of Yahoo. In
the Napoleonic wars we called the Frenchmen too many names for any one
of them to endure; but this is the age of standardisation.
"And what about our Lower Deck?" I continued.
"They? Oh, they carried on as usual. It takes a lot to impress the
Lower Deck when they're busy." And he mentioned several little things
that confirmed this. They had a great deal to do, and they did it
serenely because they had been trained to carry on under all
conditions without panicking. What they did in the way of running
repairs was even more wonderful, if that be possible, than their
normal routine.
The Lower Deck nowadays is full of strange fish with unlooked-for
accomplishments, as in the recorded case of two simple seamen of a
destroyer who, when need was sorest, came to the front as trained
experts in first-aid.
"And now--what about the actual Hun losses at Jutland?" I ventured.
"You've seen the list, haven't you?"
"Yes, but it occurred to me--that they might have been a shade
under-estimated, and I thought perhaps--"
A perfectly plain asbestos fire-curtain descended in front of the
already locked door. It was none of his business to dispute the drive.
If there were any discrepancies between estimate and results, one
might be sure that the enemy knew about them, which was the chief
thing that mattered.
It was, said he, Joss that the light was so bad at the hour of the
last round-up when our main fleet had come down from the north and
shovelled the Hun round on his tracks. _Per contra_, had it been any
other kind of weather, the odds were the Hun would not have ventured
so far. As it was, the Hun's fleet had come out and gone back again,
none the better for air and exercise. We must be thankful for what we
had managed to pick up. But talking of picking up, there was an
instance of almost unparalleled Joss which had stuck in his memory. A
soldier-man, related to one of the officers in one of our ships that
was put down, had got five days' leave from the trenches which he
spent with his relative aboard, and thus dropped in for the whole
performance. He had been employed in helping to spot, and had lived up
a mast till the ship sank, when he stepped off into the water and swam
about till he was fished out and put ashore. By that time, the tale
goes, his engine-room-dried khaki had shrunk half-way up his legs and
arms, in which costume he reported himself to the War Office, and
pleaded for one little day's extension of leave to make himself
decent. "Not a bit of it," said the War Office. "If you choose to
spend your leave playing with sailor-men and getting wet all over,
that's _your_ concern. You will return to duty by to-night's boat."
(This may be a libel on the W.O., but it sounds very like them.) "And
he had to," said the boy, "but I expect he spent the next week at
Headquarters telling fat generals all about the fight."
"And, of course, the Admiralty gave _you_ all lots of leave?"
"Us? Yes, heaps. We had nothing to do except clean down and oil up,
and be ready to go to sea again in a few hours."
That little fact was brought out at the end of almost every
destroyer's report. "Having returned to base at such and such a time,
I took in oil, etc., and reported ready for sea at ---- o'clock." When
you think of the amount of work a ship needs even after peace
manoeuvres, you can realise what has to be done on the heels of an
action. And, as there is nothing like housework for the troubled soul
of a woman, so a general clean-up is good for sailors. I had this from
a petty officer who had also passed through deep waters. "If you've
seen your best friend go from alongside you, and your own officer, and
your own boat's crew with him, and things of that kind, a man's best
comfort is small variegated jobs which he is damned for continuous."