The commander was playing his game out over again—­stroke by stroke.  “With a beam-tube I’d ha’ strafed him amidships,” he concluded.

“Why didn’t you then?” I asked.

There were loads of shiny reasons, which reminded me that we were at war and cleared for action, and that the interlude had been merely play.  A companion rose alongside and wanted to know whether we had seen anything of her dummy.

“No.  But we heard it,” was the short answer.

I was rather annoyed, because I had seen that particular daughter of destruction on the stocks only a short time ago, and here she was grown up and talking about her missing children!

In the harbour again, one found more submarines, all patterns and makes and sizes, with rumours of yet more and larger to follow.  Naturally their men say that we are only at the beginning of the submarine.  We shall have them presently for all purposes.

THE MAN AND THE WORK

Now here is a mystery of the Service.

A man gets a boat which for two years becomes his very self—­

    His morning hope, his evening dream,
    His joy throughout the day.

With him is a second in command, an engineer, and some others.  They prove each other’s souls habitually every few days, by the direct test of peril, till they act, think, and endure as a unit, in and with the boat.  That commander is transferred to another boat.  He tries to take with him if he can, which he can’t, as many of his other selves as possible.  He is pitched into a new type twice the size of the old one, with three times as many gadgets, an unexplored temperament and unknown leanings.  After his first trip he comes back clamouring for the head of her constructor, of his own second in command, his engineer, his cox, and a few other ratings.  They for their part wish him dead on the beach, because, last commission with So-and-so, nothing ever went wrong anywhere.  A fortnight later you can remind the commander of what he said, and he will deny every word of it.  She’s not, he says, so very vile—­things considered—­barring her five-ton torpedo-derricks, the abominations of her wireless, and the tropical temperature of her beer-lockers.  All of which signifies that the new boat has found her soul, and her commander would not change her for battle-cruisers.  Therefore, that he may remember he is the Service and not a branch of it, he is after certain seasons shifted to a battle-cruiser, where he lives in a blaze of admirals and aiguillettes, responsible for vast decks and crypt-like flats, a student of extended above-water tactics, thinking in tens of thousands of yards instead of his modest but deadly three to twelve hundred.

And the man who takes his place straight-way forgets that he ever looked down on great rollers from a sixty-foot bridge under the whole breadth of heaven, but crawls and climbs and dives through conning-towers with those same waves wet in his neck, and when the cruisers pass him, tearing the deep open in half a gale, thanks God he is not as they are, and goes to bed beneath their distracted keels.