those collier-nosed brutes smash it open.  Is she mucked up with submarine-catchers?  They rather improve her trim.  No other ship has them.  Have they been denied to her?  Thank Heaven, we go to sea without a fish-curing plant on deck.  Does she roll, even for her class?  She is drier than Dreadnoughts.  Is she permanently and infernally wet?  Stiff; sir—­stiff:  the first requisite of a gun-platform.

“SERVICE AS REQUISITE”

Thus the Caesars and their fortunes put out to sea with their subs and their sad-eyed engineers, and their long-suffering signallers—­I do not even know the technical name of the sin which causes a man to be born a destroyer-signaller in this life—­and the little yellow shells stuck all about where they can be easiest reached.  The rest of their acts is written for the information of the proper authorities.  It reads like a page of Todhunter.  But the masters of merchant-ships could tell more of eyeless shapes, barely outlined on the foam of their own arrest, who shout orders through the thick gloom alongside.  The strayed and anxious neutral knows them when their searchlights pin him across the deep, or their syrens answer the last yelp of his as steam goes out of his torpedoed boilers.  They stand by to catch and soothe him in his pyjamas at the gangway, collect his scattered lifeboats, and see a warm drink into him before they turn to hunt the slayer.  The drifters, punching and reeling up and down their ten-mile line of traps; the outer trawlers, drawing the very teeth of Death with water-sodden fingers, are grateful for their low, guarded signals; and when the Zeppelin’s revealing star-shell cracks darkness open above him, the answering crack of the invisible destroyers’ guns comforts the busy mine-layers.  Big cruisers talk to them, too; and, what is more, they talk back to the cruisers.  Sometimes they draw fire—­pinkish spurts of light—­a long way off, where Fritz is trying to coax them over a mine-field he has just laid; or they steal on Fritz in the midst of his job, and the horizon rings with barking, which the inevitable neutral who saw it all reports as “a heavy fleet action in the North Sea.”  The sea after dark can be as alive as the woods of summer nights.  Everything is exactly where you don’t expect it, and the shyest creatures are the farthest away from their holes.  Things boom overhead like bitterns, or scutter alongside like hares, or arise dripping and hissing from below like otters.  It is the destroyer’s business to find out what their business may be through all the long night, and to help or hinder accordingly.  Dawn sees them pitch-poling insanely between head-seas, or hanging on to bridges that sweep like scythes from one forlorn horizon to the other.  A homeward-bound submarine chooses this hour to rise, very ostentatiously, and signals by hand to a lieutenant in command. (They were the same term at Dartmouth, and same first ship.)

“What’s he sayin’?  Secure that gun, will you?  ’Can’t hear oneself speak,” The gun is a bit noisy on its mountings, but that isn’t the reason for the destroyer-lieutenant’s short temper.