Presently my friend of the destroyer went back to his stark, desolate
life, where feelings do not count, and the fact of his being cold,
wet, sea-sick, sleepless, or dog-tired had no bearing whatever on his
business, which was to turn out at any hour in any weather and do or
endure, decently, according to ritual, what that hour and that weather
demanded. It is hard to reach the kernel of Navy minds. The unbribable
seas and mechanisms they work on and through have given them the
simplicity of elements and machines. The habit of dealing with swift
accident, a life of closest and strictest association with their own
caste as well as contact with all kinds of men all earth over, have
added an immense cunning to those qualities; and that they are from
early youth cut out of all feelings that may come between them and
their ends, makes them more incomprehensible than Jesuits, even to
their own people. What, then, must they be to the enemy?
Here is a Service which prowls forth and achieves, at the lowest,
something of a victory. How far-reaching a one only the war's end will
reveal. It returns in gloomy silence, broken by the occasional hoot of
the long-shore loafer, after issuing a bulletin which though it may
enlighten the professional mind does not exhilarate the layman.
Meantime the enemy triumphs, wirelessly, far and wide. A few frigid
and perfunctory-seeming contradictions are put forward against his
resounding claims; a Naval expert or two is heard talking "off"; the
rest is silence. Anon, the enemy, after a prodigious amount of
explanation which not even the neutrals seem to take any interest in,
revises his claims, and, very modestly, enlarges his losses. Still no
sign. After weeks there appears a document giving our version of the
affair, which is as colourless, detached, and scrupulously impartial
as the findings of a prize-court. It opines that the list of enemy
losses which it submits "give the minimum in regard to numbers though
it is possibly not entirely accurate in regard to the particular class
of vessel, especially those that were sunk during the night attacks."
Here the matter rests and remains--just like our blockade. There is an
insolence about it all that makes one gasp.
Yet that insolence springs naturally and unconsciously as an oath, out
of the same spirit that caused the destroyer to pick up the dog. The
reports themselves, and tenfold more the stories not in the reports,
are charged with it, but no words by any outsider can reproduce just
that professional tone and touch. A man writing home after the fight,
points out that the great consolation for not having cleaned up the
enemy altogether was that "anyhow those East Coast devils"--a
fellow-squadron, if you please, which up till Jutland had had most of
the fighting--"were not there. They missed that show. We were as
cock-ahoop as a girl who had been to a dance that her sister has
missed."
This was one of the figures in that dance:
"A little British destroyer, her midships rent by a great shell meant
for a battle-cruiser; exuding steam from every pore; able to go ahead
but not to steer; unable to get out of anybody's way, likely to be
rammed by any one of a dozen ships; her syren whimpering: 'Let me
through! Make way!'; her crew fallen in aft dressed in life-belts
ready for her final plunge, and cheering wildly as it might have been
an enthusiastic crowd when the King passes."
Let us close on that note. We have been compassed about so long and so
blindingly by wonders and miracles; so overwhelmed by revelations of
the spirit of men in the basest and most high; that we have neither
time to keep tally of these furious days, nor mind to discern upon
which hour of them our world's fate hung.