his legs and arms, in which costume he reported himself to the War Office, and pleaded for one little day’s extension of leave to make himself decent.  “Not a bit of it,” said the War Office.  “If you choose to spend your leave playing with sailor-men and getting wet all over, that’s your concern.  You will return to duty by to-night’s boat.”  (This may be a libel on the W.O., but it sounds very like them.) “And he had to,” said the boy, “but I expect he spent the next week at Headquarters telling fat generals all about the fight.”

“And, of course, the Admiralty gave you all lots of leave?”

“Us?  Yes, heaps.  We had nothing to do except clean down and oil up, and be ready to go to sea again in a few hours.”

That little fact was brought out at the end of almost every destroyer’s report.  “Having returned to base at such and such a time, I took in oil, etc., and reported ready for sea at ——­ o’clock.”  When you think of the amount of work a ship needs even after peace manoeuvres, you can realise what has to be done on the heels of an action.  And, as there is nothing like housework for the troubled soul of a woman, so a general clean-up is good for sailors.  I had this from a petty officer who had also passed through deep waters.  “If you’ve seen your best friend go from alongside you, and your own officer, and your own boat’s crew with him, and things of that kind, a man’s best comfort is small variegated jobs which he is damned for continuous.”

THE SILENT NAVY

Presently my friend of the destroyer went back to his stark, desolate life, where feelings do not count, and the fact of his being cold, wet, sea-sick, sleepless, or dog-tired had no bearing whatever on his business, which was to turn out at any hour in any weather and do or endure, decently, according to ritual, what that hour and that weather demanded.  It is hard to reach the kernel of Navy minds.  The unbribable seas and mechanisms they work on and through have given them the simplicity of elements and machines.  The habit of dealing with swift accident, a life of closest and strictest association with their own caste as well as contact with all kinds of men all earth over, have added an immense cunning to those qualities; and that they are from early youth cut out of all feelings that may come between them and their ends, makes them more incomprehensible than Jesuits, even to their own people.  What, then, must they be to the enemy?

Here is a Service which prowls forth and achieves, at the lowest, something of a victory.  How far-reaching a one only the war’s end will reveal.  It returns in gloomy silence, broken by the occasional hoot of the long-shore loafer, after issuing a bulletin which though it may enlighten the professional mind does not exhilarate the layman.  Meantime the enemy triumphs, wirelessly, far and wide.  A few frigid and perfunctory-seeming contradictions are