“To blow things to bits is our business (and Fritz’s),
Which means there are mine-fields wherever you stroll. 
Unless you’ve particular wish to die quick, you’ll avoid steering
close to the North Sea Patrol.

“We warn from disaster the mercantile master
Who takes in high dudgeon our life-saving role,
For every one’s grousing at docking and dowsing
The marks and the lights on the North Sea Patrol.”

[Twelve verses omitted.]

So swept but surviving, half drowned but still driving,
I watched her head out through the swell off the shoal,
And I heard her propellers roar:  “Write to poor fellers

    Who run such a Hell as the North Sea Patrol!”

PATROLS

II

The great basins were crammed with craft of kinds never known before on any Navy List.  Some were as they were born, others had been converted, and a multitude have been designed for special cases.  The Navy prepares against all contingencies by land, sea, and air.  It was a relief to meet a batch of comprehensible destroyers and to drop again into the little mouse-trap ward-rooms, which are as large-hearted as all Our oceans.  The men one used to know as destroyer-lieutenants ("born stealing”) are serious Commanders and Captains to-day, but their sons, Lieutenants in command and Lieutenant-Commanders, do follow them.  The sea in peace is a hard life; war only sketches an extra line or two round the young mouths.  The routine of ships always ready for action is so part of the blood now that no one notices anything except the absence of formality and of the “crimes” of peace.  What Warrant Officers used to say at length is cut down to a grunt.  What the sailor-man did not know and expected to have told him, does not exist.  He has done it all too often at sea and ashore.

I watched a little party working under a leading hand at a job which, eighteen months ago, would have required a Gunner in charge.  It was comic to see his orders trying to overtake the execution of them.  Ratings coming aboard carried themselves with a (to me) new swing—­not swank, but consciousness of adequacy.  The high, dark foc’sles which, thank goodness, are only washed twice a week, received them and their bags, and they turned-to on the instant as a man picks up his life at home.  Like the submarine crew, they come to be a breed apart—­double-jointed, extra-toed, with brazen bowels and no sort of nerves.

It is the same in the engine-room, when the ships come in for their regular looking-over.  Those who love them, which you would never guess from the language, know exactly what they need, and get it without fuss.  Everything that steams has her individual peculiarity, and the great thing is, at overhaul, to keep to it and not develop a new one.  If, for example, through some trick of her screws not synchronising,