“What did Arabella do?” I had heard a good deal of Arabella.

“Oh, Arabella’s quite different.  Her job has always been to look after her master’s pyjamas—­folded up at the head of the bunk, you know.  She found out pretty soon the bridge was no place for a lady, so she hopped downstairs and got in.  You know how she makes three little jumps to it—­first, on to the chair; then on the flap-table, and then up on the pillow.  When the show was over, there she was as usual.”

“Was she glad to see her master?”

“Ra-ather. Arabella was the bold, gay lady-dog then!”

Now Arabella is between nine and eleven and a half inches long.

“Does the Hun run to pets at all?”

“I shouldn’t say so.  He’s an unsympathetic felon—­the Hun.  But he might cherish a dachshund or so.  We never picked up any ships’ pets off him, and I’m sure we should if there had been.”

That I believed as implicitly as the tale of a destroyer attack some months ago, the object of which was to flush Zeppelins.  It succeeded, for the flotilla was attacked by several.  Right in the middle of the flurry, a destroyer asked permission to stop and lower dinghy to pick up ship’s dog which had fallen overboard.  Permission was granted, and the dog was duly rescued.  “Lord knows what the Hun made of it,” said my informant.  “He was rumbling round, dropping bombs; and the dinghy was digging out for all she was worth, and the Dog-Fiend was swimming for Dunkirk.  It must have looked rather mad from above.  But they saved the Dog-Fiend, and then everybody swore he was a German spy in disguise.”

THE FIGHT

“And—­about this Jutland fight?” I hinted, not for the first time.

“Oh, that was just a fight.  There was more of it than any other fight, I suppose, but I expect all modern naval actions must be pretty much the same.”

“But what does one do—­how does one feel?” I insisted, though I knew it was hopeless.

“One does one’s job.  Things are happening all the time.  A man may be right under your nose one minute—­serving a gun or something—­and the next minute he isn’t there.”

“And one notices that at the time?”

“Yes.  But there’s no time to keep on noticing it.  You’ve got to carry on somehow or other, or your show stops.  I tell you what one does notice, though.  If one goes below for anything, or has to pass through a flat somewhere, and one sees the old wardroom clock ticking, or a photograph pinned up, or anything of that sort, one notices that.  Oh yes, and there was another thing—­the way a ship seemed to blow up if you were far off her.  You’d see a glare, then a blaze, and then the smoke—­miles high, lifting quite slowly.  Then you’d get the row and the jar of it—­just like bumping over submarines.  Then, a long while after p’raps, you run through a regular rain of bits of burnt paper coming down on the decks—­like showers of volcanic ash, you know.”  The door of the operating-room seemed just about to open, but it shut again.