“And the Huns’ gunnery?”

“That was various.  Sometimes they began quite well, and went to pieces after they’d been strafed a little; but sometimes they picked up again.  There was one Hun-boat that got no end of a hammering, and it seemed to do her gunnery good.  She improved tremendously till we sank her.  I expect we’d knocked out some scientific Hun in the controls, and he’d been succeeded by a man who knew how.”

It used to be “Fritz” last year when they spoke of the enemy.  Now it is Hun or, as I have heard, “Yahun,” being a superlative of Yahoo.  In the Napoleonic wars we called the Frenchmen too many names for any one of them to endure; but this is the age of standardisation.

“And what about our Lower Deck?” I continued.

“They?  Oh, they carried on as usual.  It takes a lot to impress the Lower Deck when they’re busy.”  And he mentioned several little things that confirmed this.  They had a great deal to do, and they did it serenely because they had been trained to carry on under all conditions without panicking.  What they did in the way of running repairs was even more wonderful, if that be possible, than their normal routine.

The Lower Deck nowadays is full of strange fish with unlooked-for accomplishments, as in the recorded case of two simple seamen of a destroyer who, when need was sorest, came to the front as trained experts in first-aid.

“And now—­what about the actual Hun losses at Jutland?” I ventured.

“You’ve seen the list, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but it occurred to me—­that they might have been a shade under-estimated, and I thought perhaps—­”

A perfectly plain asbestos fire-curtain descended in front of the already locked door.  It was none of his business to dispute the drive.  If there were any discrepancies between estimate and results, one might be sure that the enemy knew about them, which was the chief thing that mattered.

It was, said he, Joss that the light was so bad at the hour of the last round-up when our main fleet had come down from the north and shovelled the Hun round on his tracks. Per contra, had it been any other kind of weather, the odds were the Hun would not have ventured so far.  As it was, the Hun’s fleet had come out and gone back again, none the better for air and exercise.  We must be thankful for what we had managed to pick up.  But talking of picking up, there was an instance of almost unparalleled Joss which had stuck in his memory.  A soldier-man, related to one of the officers in one of our ships that was put down, had got five days’ leave from the trenches which he spent with his relative aboard, and thus dropped in for the whole performance.  He had been employed in helping to spot, and had lived up a mast till the ship sank, when he stepped off into the water and swam about till he was fished out and put ashore.  By that time, the tale goes, his engine-room-dried khaki had shrunk half-way up