So Tyler Kamps had travelled up to Chicago.  Whenever they passed a sizable town they had thrown open the windows and yelled, “Youp!  Who-ee!  Yow!”

People had rushed to the streets and had stood there gazing after the train.  Tyler hadn’t done much youping at first, but in the later stages of the journey he joined in to keep his spirits up.  He, who had never been more than a two-hours’ ride from home was flashing past villages, towns, cities—­hundreds of them.

The first few days had been unbelievably bad, what with typhoid inoculations, smallpox vaccinations, and loneliness.  The very first day, when he had entered his barracks one of the other boys, older in experience, misled by Tyler’s pink and white and gold colouring, had leaned forward from amongst a group and had called in glad surprise, at the top of a leathery pair of lungs: 

“Why, hello, sweetheart!” The others had taken it up with cruelty of their age.  “Hello, sweetheart!” It had stuck.  Sweetheart.  In the hard years that followed—­years in which the blood-thirsty and piratical games of his boyhood paled to the mildest of imaginings—­the nickname still clung, long after he had ceased to resent it; long after he had stripes and braid to refute it.

But in that Tyler Kamps we are not interested.  It is the boy Tyler Kamps with whom we have to do.  Bewildered, lonely, and a little resentful.  Wondering where the sea part of it came in.  Learning to say “on the station” instead of “at the station,” the idea being that the great stretch of land on which the station was located was not really land, but water; and the long wooden barracks not really barracks at all, but ships.  Learning to sleep in a hammock (it took him a full week).  Learning to pin back his sailor collar to save soiling the white braid on it (that meant scrubbing).  Learning—­but why go into detail?  One sentence covers it.

Tyler met Gunner Moran.  Moran, tattooed, hairy-armed, hairy-chested as a gorilla and with something of the sadness and humour of the gorilla in his long upper lip and short forehead.  But his eyes did not bear out the resemblance.  An Irish blue; bright, unravaged; clear beacon lights in a rough and storm-battered countenance.  Gunner Moran wasn’t a gunner at all, or even a gunner’s mate, but just a seaman who knew the sea from Shanghai to New Orleans; from Liverpool to Barcelona.  His knowledge of knots and sails and rifles and bayonets and fists was a thing to strike you dumb.  He wasn’t the stuff of which officers are made.  But you should have seen him with a Springfield!  Or a bayonet!  A bare twenty-five, Moran, but with ten years’ sea experience.  Into those ten years he had jammed a lifetime of adventure.  And he could do expertly all the things that Tyler Kamps did amateurishly.  In a barrack, or in a company street, the man who talks the loudest is the man who has the most influence.  In Tyler’s barrack Gunner Moran was that man.