XIV
ON CAMOUFLAGE—AND SHIPS' NAMES
EARLY in the war the rappel of 'Business as usual' was as deadly at sea as elsewhere. Arrogant and super-confident in our pride of sea-place, we made little effort to trim and adapt our practice to rapidly altering conditions; there were few visible signs to disquiet us, we hardly deviated from our peaceful sea-path, and had no concern for interference. We carried our lights ablaze, advertised our doings in plain wireless, announced our sailings and arrivals, and even devoted more than usual attention to keeping our ships as span in brave new paint and glistening varnish as the hearts of impressionable passengers could desire.
We had difficulties with our manning. The seamen were off, at first tuck of drum, to what they reckoned a more active part in the great game of war—the strictly Naval Service—and we were left with weak crews of new and raw hands to carry on the sea-trade. So, from the very first of it, we engaged in a moral camouflage in our efforts to keep up appearances, and show the neutrals with whom we did business that such a thing as war could hardly disturb the smooth running of our master machine—the Merchants' Service!
Some there were among us who saw the peril in such prominence, and took modest (and somewhat hesitating) steps to keep out of the limelight, by setting lonely courses on the sea, restraining the comradely gossip of wireless operators, and toning down appearances from brilliant polish to the more sombre part suiting a sea in war-time. Deck lights were painted over and obscured, funnel and masts were allowed to grey to neutral tints, the brown ash that discomposes fine paint at sea was looked upon with a new and friendly eye. The bias of chief mates (in a service where promotion is the due for a clean and tidy ship) was, with difficulty, overcome, and a new era of keen look-out and sea-trim started.
There was but moderate support for these bold iconoclasts who dared thus to affront our high fetish. Ship painting and decoration and upkeep were sacrosanct rites that even masters must conform to; the enactments of the Medes and Persians were but idle rules, mere by-laws, compared to the formulæ and prescriptions that governed the tone of our pantry cupboards and the shades of cunning grain-work. We were peaceful merchantmen; what was the use of our dressing up like a parish-rigged man-o'-war? As to the lights—darkening ship would upset the passengers; there would be rumours and apprehension. They would travel in less 'nervous' vessels!
The mine that shattered Manchester Commerce stirred the base of our happy conventions; the cruise of the Emden set it swaying perilously; the torpedoes that sank Falaba and Lusitania blew the whole sham edifice to the winds, and we began to think of our ships in other terms than those of freight and passenger rates. Our conceptions of peaceful merchantmen were not the enemy's!
We set about to make our vessels less conspicuous. Grey! We painted our hulls and funnels grey. In many colours of grey. The nuances of our coatings were accidental. Poor quality paint and variable untimely mixings contributed, but it was mainly by crew troubles (deficiency and incapacity) that we came by our first camouflage. As needs must, we painted sections at a time—a patch here, a plate or two there—laid on in the way that real sailors would call 'inside-out'! We sported suits of many colours, an infinite variety of shades. Quite suddenly we realized that grey, in such an ample range—red-greys, blue-greys, brown-greys, green-greys—intermixed on our hulls, gave an excellent low-visibility colour that blended into the misty northern landscape.
Bolshevik now in our methods, we worked on other schemes to trick the murderer's eye. Convention again beset our path. The great god Symmetry—whom we had worshipped to our undoing—was torn from his high place. The glamour of Balances, that we had thought so fine and shipshape, fell from our eyes, and we saw treachery in every regular disposition. Pairs—in masts, ventilators, rails and stanchions, boat-groupings, samson posts, even in the shrouds and rigging—were spies to the enemy, and we rearranged and screened and altered as best we could, in every way that would serve to give a false indication of our course and speed. Freighters and colliers (that we had scorned because of ugly forward rake of mast and funnel) became the leaders of our fashion. We wedged our masts forward (where we could) and slung a gaff on the fore side of the foremast; we planked the funnel to look more or less upright; we painted a curling bow wash over the propellor and a black elaborate stern on the bows. We trimmed our ships by the head, and flattered ourselves that, Janus-like, we were heading all ways!
Few, including the enemy, were greatly deceived. At that point where alterations of apparent course were important—to put the putting Fritz off his stroke—the deck-houses and erections with their beamwise fronts or ends would be plainly noted, and a true line of course be readily deduced. With all our new zeal, we stopped short of altering standing structures, but we could paint, and we made efforts to shield our weakness by varied applications. Our device was old enough, a return to the chequer of ancient sea-forts and the line of painted gun-ports with which we used to decorate our clipper sailing ships. (That also was a camouflage of its day—an effort to overawe Chinese and Malay pirates by the painted resemblance to the gun-deck of a frigate.) We saw the eye-disturbing value of a bold criss-cross, and those of us who had paint to spare made a 'Hobson-jobson' of awning spars and transverse bulkheads.
These were our sea-efforts—rude trials effected with great difficulty in the stress of the new sea-warfare. We could only see ourselves from a surface point of view, and, in our empirics, we had no official assistance. During our brief stay in port it was impossible to procure day-labouring gangs—even the 'gulls' of the dockside were busy at sea. On a voyage, gun crews and extra look-outs left few hands of the watch available for experiments; in any case, our rationed paint covered little more than would keep the rust in check. We were relieved when new stars of marine coloration arose, competent shore concerns that, on Government instruction, arrayed us in a novel war paint. Our rough and amateurish tricks gave way to the ordered schemes of the dockyard; our ships were armed for us in a protective coat of many colours.
Upon us like an avalanche came this real camouflage. Somewhere behind it all a genius of pantomimic transformation blazed his rainbow wand and fixed us. As we came in from sea, dazzle-painters swarmed on us, bespattered creatures with no bowels of compassion, who painted over our cherished glass and teakwood and brass port-rims—the last lingering evidences of our gentility. Hourly we watched our trim ships take on the hues of a swingman's roundabouts. We learned of fancy colours known only in high art—alizarin and grey-pink, purple-lake and Hooker's green. The designs of our mantling held us in a maze of expectation. Bends and ecartelés, indents and rayons, gyrony and counter-flory, appeared on our topsides; curves and arrow-heads were figured on boats and davits and deck fittings; apparently senseless dabs and patches were measured and imprinted on funnel curve and rounding of the ventilators; inboard and outboard we were streaked and crossed and curved.
With our arming of guns there was need for instruction in their service and maintenance; artificial smoke-screens required that we should be efficient in their use; our Otters called for some measure of seamanship in adjustment and control. So far all governmental appliances for our defence relied on our understanding and operation, but this new protective coloration, held aloof from our confidence, it was quite self-contained, there was no rule to be learnt; we were to be shipmates with a new contrivance, to the operation of which we had no control. For want of point in discussion, we criticized freely. We surpassed ourselves in adjectival review; we stared in horror and amazement as each newly bedizened vessel passed down the river. In comparison and simile we racked memory for text to the gaudy creations. "Water running under a bridge.". . . "Forced draught on a woolly sheep's back." . . . "Mural decoration in a busy butcher's shop." . . . "Strike me a rosy bloody pink!" said one of the hands, "if this 'ere don't remind me o' jaundice an' malaria an' a touch o' th' sun, an' me in a perishin' dago 'orspittel!"
While naming the new riot of colour grotesque—a monstrosity, an outrage, myopic madness—we were ready enough to grasp at anything that might help us in the fight at sea. We scanned our ships from all points and angles to unveil the hidden imposition. Fervently we hoped that there would be more in it than met our eye—that our preposterous livery was not only an effort to make Gargantuan faces at the Boche! Only the most splendid results could justify our bewilderment.
Out on the sea we came to a better estimate of the value of our novel war-paint. In certain lights and positions we seemed to be steering odd courses—it was very difficult to tell accurately the line of a vessel's progress. The low visibility that we seamen had sought was sacrificed to enhance a bold disruption of perspective. While our efforts at deception, based more or less on a one-colour scheme of greys, may have rendered our ships less visible against certain favouring backgrounds of sea and sky, there were other weather conditions in which we would stand out sharply revealed. Abandoning the effort to cloak a stealthy sea-passage, our newly constituted Department of Marine Camouflage decked us out in a bold pattern, skilfully arranged to disrupt our perspective, and give a false impression of our line of course. With a torpedo travelling to the limit of its run—striking anything that may lie in its course, range is of little account. Deflection, on the other hand, is everything in the torpedo-man's problem—the correct estimation of a point of contact of two rapidly moving bodies. He relies for a solution on an accurate judgment of his target's course; it became the business of the dazzle-painters to complicate his working by a feint in colour and design. The new camouflage has so distorted our sheer and disrupted the colour in the mass as to make our vessels less easy to hit. If not invisible against average backgrounds, the dazzlers have done their work so well that we are at least partially lost in every elongation.
The mystery withheld from us—the system of our decoration—has done much to ease the rigours of our war-time sea-life. In argument and discussion on its origin and purpose we have found a topic, almost as unfailing in its interest as the record day's run of the old sailing ships. We are agreed that it is a brave martial coat we wear, but are divided in our theories of production. How is it done? By what shrewd system are we controlled that no two ships are quite alike in their splendour? We know that instructions come from a department of the Admiralty to the dockyard painters, in many cases by telegraph. Is there a system of abbreviations, a colourist's shorthand, or are there maritime Heralds in Whitehall who blazon our arms for the guidance of the rude dockside painters? It can be worked out in fine and sonorous proportions:
For s.s. Corncrix
Party per pale, a pale; first, gules, a fesse dancette, sable; second, vert, bendy, lozengy, purpure cottised with nodules of the first; third, sable, three billets bendwise in fesse, or: sur tout de tout, a barber's pole cockbilled on a sinking gasometer, all proper. For motto: "Doing them in the eye."
One wonders if our old conservatism, our clinging to the past, shall persist long after the time of strife has gone; if, in the years when war is a memory and the time comes to deck our ships in pre-war symmetry and grace of black hulls and white-painted deck-work and red funnels and all the gallant show of it, some old masters among us may object to the change.
"Well, have it as you like," they may say. "I was brought up in the good old-fashioned cubist system o' ship painting—fine patterns o' reds an' greens an' Ricketts' blue, an' brandy-ball stripes an' that! None o' your damned newfangled ideas of one-colour sections for me!. . . Huh!. . . And black hulls, too!. . . Black! A funeral outfit!. . . No, sir! I may be wrong, but anyway, I'm too old now to chop and change about!"
If we have become reconciled to the weird patterns of our war-paint, every instinct of seafaring that is in us rebels against the new naming of our ships. Is it but another form of camouflage—like the loving Indian mother abusing her dear children for deception of a malicious listening Djinn? War Cowslip, War Dance, War Dreamer! War Hell! Are our new standard ships being thus badly named, that the enemy may look upon them as pariahs, unworthy of shell or torpedo? Perhaps, as a thoughtful war measure, it may be chargeful of pregnant meaning; our new war names for the ships may be germane to some distant world movement, the first tender shoot of which we cannot yet recognize! More than likely, it is the result of the fine war-time frolic of fitting the cubest of square pegs in the roundest of holes. How is it done? Is there, in the hutments of St. James's Park, an otherwise estimable and blameless greengrocer, officially charged with the task of finding names for vessels, 015537-68 inclusive, presently on the Controller's lists and due to be launched?
We sailors are jealous for our vessels. Abuse us if you will, but have a care for what you may say of our ships. We alone are entitled to call them bitches, wet brutes, stubborn craft, but we will stand for no such liberties from the beach; strikes have occurred on very much less sufficient ground. Ridicule in the naming of our ships is intolerable. If War is to be the prefix, why cannot our greengrocer find suitable words in the chronicles of strife? Can there be anything less martial than the War Rambler, War Linnet, War Titmouse, War Gossamer? Why not the War Teashop, the War Picture House, the—the—the War Lollipop? Are we rationed in ships' names? Is there a Controller of Marine Nomenclature? The thing is absurd!
If our controllers had sense they would see the danger in thus flouting our sentiment; they would value the recruiting agency of a good name; they would recognize that the naming of a ship should be done with as great care as that of an heir to an earldom. Is the torpedoed bos'n of the Eumaeus going to boast of a new post on the War Bandbox? What are the feelings of the captain of a Ruritania when he goes to the yards to take over a War Whistler? Why War? If sober, businesslike argument be needed, it is confusing; it introduces a repetition of initial syllable that makes for dangerous tangles in the scheme of direction and control.
It is all quite unnecessary. There are names and enough. Fine names! Seamanlike names! Good names! Names that any sailor would be proud to have on his worsted jersey! Names that he would shout out in the market-place! Names that the enemy would read as monuments to his infamy! Names of ships that we knew and loved and stood by to the bitter end.