“Captain R------, of the Royal Navy!” explained the officer, introducing
himself.

“I’ll take your name and address!” said the sentry.

“The Admiralty.  I take the responsibility.”

“As I’ll report, sir!” said the sentry, not so convinced but he burred something further into the chauffeur’s ear.

This seems to have little to do with the navy, but it has much, indeed, as a part of unfathomable, complicated business of guards within guards, intelligence battling with intelligence, deceiving raiders by land or sea, of those responsible for the safety of England and the mastery of the seas.

It is from the navy yard that the ships go forth to battle and to the navy yard they must return for supplies and for the grooming beat of hammers in the dry dock.  Those who work at a navy yard keep the navy’s house; welcome home all the family, from Dreadnoughts to trawlers, give them cheer and shelter and bind up their wounds.

The quarter-deck of action for Admiral Lowry, commanding the great base on the Forth, which was begun before the war and hastened to completion since, was a substantial brick building.  Adjoining his office, where he worked with engineers’ blue prints as well as with sea charts, he had fitted up a small bedroom where he slept, to be at hand if an emergency arose.

Partly we walked, as he showed us over his domain of steam-shovels, machine shops, cement factories, of building and repairs, of coaling and docking, and partly we rode on a car that ran over temporary rails laid for trucks loaded with rocks and dirt.  Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, a river bottom had been filled in back of the quays with material that had been excavated to form a vast basin with cement walls, where squadrons of Dreadnoughts might rest and await their turn to be warped into the great dry docks which open off it in chasmlike galleries.

“The largest contract in all England,” said the contractor.  “And here is the man who checks up my work,” he added, nodding to the lean, Scottish naval engineer who was with us.  It was clear from his looks that only material of the best quality and work that was true would be acceptable to this canny mentor of efficiency, “And the workers?  Have you had any strikes here?”

“No.  We have employed double the usual number of men from the start of the war,” he said.  “I’m afraid that the Welsh coal troubles have been accepted as characteristic.  Our men have been reasonable and patriotic.  They have shown the right spirit.  If they hadn’t, how could we have accomplished that?”

We were looking down into the depths of a dry dock blasted out of the rock, which had been begun and completed within the year.  And we had heard nothing of all this through those twelve months!  No writer, no photographer, chronicled this silent labour!  Double lines of guards surrounded the place day and night.  Only tried patriots might enter this world of a busy army in smudged workmen’s clothes, bending to their tasks with that ordered discipline of industrialism which wears no uniforms, marches without beat of drums, and toils that the ships shall want nothing to ensure victory.