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 weeks after 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 me tell 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.
III. WHAT THE AMERICAN BLUEJACKET THINKS OF BRITAIN AND THE BRITISH
The scroll of human experience has been unrolling at rather a dizzy rate
for both the American 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 material they 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've never 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 all professional 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 the outset--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.
I have already written of the mixed feelings of curiosity and interest
with which the British bluejackets awaited their first intimate meeting
with the Yanks. It was no whit different on the part of the latter.
With the Northern Base swept by its more or less unending succession
of winter storms, there was not much chance for personal contact in
the first few months after the Americans came over, and before better
weather and lengthening spring days gave opportunity for inter-fleet
visits and foregatherings ashore the men of both Navies had had a good
many chances to see each other handling their ships. From that alone a
deep mutual respect was born, and it was on that solid foundation that
the present astonishingly friendly relations between the men of the two
allied Navies is based. The British, with four years of war experience
behind them, were doing things with their ships, quite in the ordinary
course of the day's work, that the Americans had never reckoned on
attempting save in emergency. The shooting and the general efficiency of
the British ships under the arduous North Sea winter conditions deepened
and broadened the respect and admiration of the Americans the more
they saw of it, and the more they discovered the extent to which they
would have to exert and outdo themselves to equal it. The feeling of
the American bluejacket on this score was concisely but comprehensively
expressed by an old Yankee man-of-war's-man--one of the few real
veterans I have encountered on this side--with whom I had a yarn not
long after the arrival of U.S.S. _New York_.
Coming in from a "big-gun-shoot," the American squadron had sighted a
squadron of British battle cruisers carrying out a series of intricate
manoeuvres with destroyers at a speed which would have been reckoned
as suicidal as late as a year or two ago, and which there is little
doubt would not be attempted outside of the Grand Fleet even to-day.
The sun-pickled phiz of the old sea-dog crinkled with a grin of sheer
delight and wonder as the lean cruisers, each a mass of turrets,
funnels, and tripod mast between tossing bow-wave and foaming wake,
dashed in and out of the spreading smoke-screens with a unity of
movement that might have been animated by the pull of a single string.
Then, when to cap the climax the speeding warships opened up with their
heavies and began to straddle a target that was teetering along on the
edge of the skyline ten or twelve miles away, he gave his broad thigh a
resounding slap and turned to me with:
"By cripes, things do move, believe me! I was on the _Oregon_ when we
chased old Cervera's ships up the Cuba coast in the Spanish war, and we
were nigh to busting our boilers doing half the speed of them battle
cruisers. And as for keeping station--it was just a case of devil take
the hindmost. But these Johnnies here would go straight through a scrap
just as they're playing that little game over there. By cracky, I takes
off my hat to them. They're sure on the job, and you just bet that's
good enough for us."
I think if I was asked to sum up very briefly just what the American
bluejacket thinks of the ships of the Grand Fleet and the men who man
them, I would simply quote those final words--"They're sure on the job,
and you just bet that's good enough for us."
With this foundation of respect and admiration to stand on once
established, there was little to worry about on the score of personal
relations. Both of them were as bashful as children on the occasions
of their first tentative inter-ship visits, but this quickly wore off
when they found that they both spoke the same language, and it was not
very far from that to the "pal-ling" stage. Then they began to box and
play occasional games of "soccer" together, and, where either could not
play the other's sport, to give attention to baseball or "rugger," as
the case might be, with the idea of trying to find out for themselves
what there really was in the other man's game. This is still going on,
and British sailors with baseball bats and gloves, or Yankee tars with
cricket bats and shin pads, are becoming commoner and commoner sights at
the recreation grounds in the vicinity of the northern bases.
I have already told how the feeling of the British bluejacket for the
Yankee "gob"--as the latter appears to like to be called--changed from
one of aloof curiosity, through a mild sort of "liking," to active
affection; and to describe how the Americans' feelings have run the same
gamut would be merely to tell the story in reverse. But I cannot refrain
from setting down the personal tribute of one "gob" in particular to
British bluejackets in general, for, in its way, it is quite as typical
as the words I have quoted respecting the old Yankee gunner's estimate
of the Grand Fleet.
The "gob" in question had been born on or very near the Bowery, but
seven years in the Navy had obliterated all traces but the accent. He
was a stoker, and as the champion "light-heavy" of the American squadron
was being put on in an occasional special bout in the course of the
British squadron eliminations. In spite of the fact that the British
box only three rounds, where the American Navy had been boxing six,
and a number of other variations in rules, he had done extremely well,
having lost but a single bout, and that by being slightly out-pointed.
He was still nursing a black eye from this latter contest--in which his
sportsmanlike conduct no less than his cleverness had won the admiration
of every one present--when I asked him if he had been satisfied with the
decision. "Poifickly," was the instant reply. "He had too much steam for
me from the first gong; but I'll do better when I've woiked out a lil'
longer to go the three 'stead o' the six round course. Wot do I tink o'
the British as sports? Say, they's the best ever. They's more than just
gent'men. They's reg'lar fellers, take it from me, and wot more can you
ask than that?"
If the Yankee sailor has any superlative beyond "regular feller" to
apply to a mate who has met with his approval, I have yet to learn what
it is.
The men of the American destroyers and submarines, working more by
themselves than the battleships with the Grand Fleet, have seen
rather less of the British bluejacket, and--with better opportunities
for London leave--more of the British civilians than their mates
in the latter units. They have all found much to entertain and
interest them in Liverpool, London, Glasgow and the other large
cities they have visited. They have enjoyed the theatres and art
galleries, and are very appreciative of the various canteens that
have been provided for their comfort. But it has been none of these
that has made the greatest appeal to them, but rather those at
first rare but now increasingly frequent visits to an English or a
Scottish home. I don't mean the boat-on-the-river-with-band and the
tea-party-on-the-lawn-of-some-ancestral-castle kind of thing, which are
all very well as far as they go; but rather the quiet, unostentatious
hospitality of a British home of somewhere near the same class as
the visitor comes from in the States. This kind of kindness has gone
straight to the heart. The Yankee sailor lad is a good deal more of a
"mother's boy" than he will ever admit to any one save possibly some
other boy's mother, and I have heard two or three pretty swaggery young
"gobs" speak with rather more than a suggestion of a catch in their
voices of the kindness that has been shown them--of the things they have
seen and heard and learned--in one of these visits to a British home.
One day a quartermaster--his folding bed was triced up next to mine in
the forward torpedo-flat, and we had fallen into the habit of exchanging
confidences in the long quiet hours of submergence--of the American
submarine in which I was recently out on its regular North Atlantic
patrol told me how much the visit he had been privileged to make to a
little English home in Liverpool had meant to him. And presently, after
a pause, as though the thought of one had awakened the thought of the
other in his mind, he told me of something else he had seen on one of
his leave trips.
"I happened to be in Cork for a few hours on my way through," he said.
"We are not allowed to visit there, you know, for fear that we may be
tempted to beat up a few Sinn Feiners; but if we are marooned there
waiting for a connexion there is nothing against our strolling about the
town. Well, just at one end of the main bridge across the River Lee,
they have the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack floating side by
side from the top of one of the iron poles of the electric car line. I
don't know whose idea it was, except that the Sinn Feiners had nothing
to do with it. Now the ordinary way to have handled them would have
been to bend each flag to separate halyards, and to hoist and lower
independently. But some man with a head on his shoulders (possibly he
had been a sailor) evidently had the run of the show, and what had been
done was this: Taking two crosspieces, he had bent the flags to the two
lines joining their ends. Then a single halyard, rigged to run over a
block to the upper crosspiece, hoisted and lowered the two flags, always
side by side, at one operation. Well, now, looking at that, it chanced
that I seemed to see something more than a very neat little contrivance
for saving time in handling a couple of squares of coloured bunting. It
seemed to me that it stood for a sort of symbol of the fact that the
Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack are being rigged to fly together
for a good many years; and that they aren't going to be able to lower
one without bringing down the other."
I do not know how many of the men of the American ships at the Irish
bases have seen that particular little "bunting hoist," but I do know
that the sentiment my young submarine friend read into it finds an echo
in the breast of practically every one of them.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED.
LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND.
Transcriber's notes:
The following is a list of changes made to the original.
The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
for'rard, wait till there was an interval in both
for'ard, wait till there was an interval in both
puttin' that blinkin' pyrit down to Davy Jones."'
puttin' that blinkin' pyrit down to Davy Jones."'"
than they had been right along up to them. We
than they had been right along up to then. We
_Emden_ or _Konigsberg_. Just which it was we
_Emden_ or _Königsberg_. Just which it was we
a shell-hole in the fo'c'sl'e deck, through which
a shell-hole in the fo'c'sle deck, through which
with the _Konigsberg_ turning up at any moment,
with the _Königsberg_ turning up at any moment,
had charge of in the _Emden_ show Von Müller in
had charge of in the _Emden_ shows Von Müller in
"It's fair," he admitted grudingly, "only fair.
"It's fair," he admitted grudgingly, "only fair.
contracted ashore and carried--and often spread--abroad.
contracted ashore and carried--and often spread--aboard.
became at once his own natural self The sailorly
became at once his own natural self. The sailorly
"I had been asked aboard the _Xerxes_ for an
I had been asked aboard the _Xerxes_ for an
destoyers, submarines, ranged class by class and
destroyers, submarines, ranged class by class and
bunks of the battleship, while perhaps a shade
bunkers of the battleship, while perhaps a shade
End of Project Gutenberg's Stories of the Ships, by Lewis R. Freeman