1917.
The "liaison officer" felt distinctly nervous as his steamboat approached the gangway. He had no qualms as to his capabilities of carrying out the work he was detailed for—that of acting as signals-and-operations-interpreter aboard the Flotilla leader of a recently allied destroyer division—but the fact that he had been told that he must be prepared to be tactful weighed heavily on his mind. His ideas on the subject of Americans were somewhat hidebound, but at the same time very vague. Would they spring the statement on him that they had "come over to win the War for you," or would they refer at once to their War of Independence? Did the Yankees hate all Britishers, or—— His boat bumped alongside the neat teak ladder, and he noted with a seaman's appreciation the perfectly-formed coachwhipping and Turks' Heads on the rails. A moment later he was standing on a very clean steel deck, gravely returning the salute of what appeared to be a muster of all the officers in the ship.
A tall commander took a pace forward. "Malcolm," he said, "I'm Captain—glad to meet you." The Englishman saluted, and they shook hands. "My name's Jackson," he replied, and turned as the American, taking his arm, ran through a rapid introduction to the other officers. Each of these repeated the formula, accompanied by the quick bow and handshake. Jackson followed suit as best he could, and began to feel that on such formal occasions he had the makings of a real attaché or diplomatist in him.
A few minutes, and he found himself sitting in a long-chair in a wardroom which might have been a counterpart of his own, and accepting a long cigar from the box handed him. "Did you have a good trip over?" he ventured.
"We sure did, and saw nix—not even a U-boat. Had a bit of a gale first day out, but it blew off quick. But say, there wasn't a German ship for three thousand miles. Don't you ever see some about?"
"Well, you see—er—no. They only show out now and then, and it's only for a few hours when they do. Of course, there are plenty of Fritzes, but they keep under most of the time—you don't see them much."
"Well, we thought it real slow, didn't we, Commander? We were just ripe for some gunplay, but we never got a chance to pull."
Jackson looked across at the Commander and smiled. "We felt that way for a long time, sir. But now we just go on hoping and keeping ready. We've had so many false alarms, you see."
The Commander laughed. "That's one on you, Benson," he said. "We won't get so excited next time we see the Northern Lights."
There was a general shout of laughter, and Jackson turned cold. This, he thought, was a little early for him to start putting his foot in it. The officer called Benson, however, did not appear to be about to throw over the alliance just yet. He walked to the sideboard, and returned with a couple of lumps of sugar in his hand. "Lootenant," he said gravely, "in the absence of stimulants in the U.S. Navy, I can only give you what we've got. We've no liquor aboard, but we've sure got sugar."
"Yes," said the Commander. "We're all on the water-waggon here, whether we like the ride or not."
Jackson sat up in his chair and shed his official pose. He could, at any rate, talk without reserve on Service subjects. "Well, sir," he said, "I'm not a teetotaller, but it doesn't worry me to go teetotal if I've got to. I don't worry about it if I'm in training for anything; and the fact is—well, if there was a referendum, or something of that sort, in the Navy as to whether we were to be compulsory teetotallers or not, I believe the majority would vote for 'no drinks.' I would, anyway, and I'm what you'd call an average drinker."
"They didn't ask us to vote any, but if they had—in war-time—I guess we'd have voted the same way. If you can't get it you don't want it, and we've kind of got used to water now. And so your name's Jackson? Any relation?"
Jackson's brain worked at high pressure. This was a poser. Sir Henry Jackson? Stonewall? How many noted Jacksons were there? He played for safety and replied with a negative.
"Ah, well! there's perhaps some connection you don't know of," said the Commander encouragingly. "Which part of England are your folk from? Birmingham. Well, of course, it's a big family.... My father knew him well, and was with him through the Valley Campaign."
Jackson sighed with relief. "You're from Virginia then, sir?"
"No, sir—I'm from Maryland. My father joined the Army of Virginia two days before Bull Run."
"Are you all Southerners here, then?"
"We're sure not," came a chorus of voices. "Nix on Secesh ... John Brown's Body...." Jackson developed nerves again. He felt as if he had asked a Nationalist meeting to join him in drinking confusion to the Pope. The company did not seem disposed to let him off, however.
"Which do you think ought to have won, Lootenant? You were neutral—let's hear it."
Jackson looked apologetically at the Commander.
"Well, sir, I think the North had to win; and" (he hurried on) "it's just as well she did, because if she hadn't there wouldn't be any U.S.A. now—only a lot of small states."
"That's so; but there need not have been any war at all."
"There needn't, sir; but it made the U.S.A. all the same. The big event of the Franco-Prussian War wasn't the surrender at Sedan; it was the crowning of the German Emperor at Versailles. And in the Civil War—well, it made one nation of the Americans in the same way as the other did of the Germans."
"Well, Lootenant, if wars are just to make nations into one, what was the good of our wars with you?"
Jackson was getting over his self-consciousness, and it was dawning on him that the American Navy has a method of "drawing" very similar to that in use in his own.
"They were a lot of use," he protested. "We sent German troops against you, and you killed lots of them."
There was a general laugh.
"Say, Jackson," came a voice, "this little old country of yours isn't doing much with the Germans now except kill them. Say, she's great! You're doing all the work, and you've kept on telling us you're doing nix. Your papers just talk small, as if your Army was only a Yale-Princetown football crowd, and you were the coon and not the Big Stick of the bunch that's in it."
"Well, you see, we don't like talking about ourselves except to just buck our own people up."
Jackson's tone as he said this was, I regret to say, just what yours or mine would have been. It could only be described as "smug."
"You sure don't. We like to say what we're doing when we come from New York."
Jackson prepared for an effort of tact. "I hear," he said, "you've got quite a lot of troops across already."
They told him—and his eyes opened.
"What!" he said. "And how many——?" He digested the answers for a moment, and decided that his store of tact could be pigeon-holed again for a while. "But what about—your papers haven't—I don't call that talking much. We still think you're just beginning."
"So we are,—we've hardly started. But our papers were given the wise word, and they don't talk war secrets."
Jackson readjusted his ideas slightly, and his attitude deflated itself. The transportation of the First Expeditionary Force had been talked of as a big thing, but this—and he had until then heard no whisper of it.
"And the country?" he asked. "What about all your pro-Germans and aliens?"
"They don't," came the answer. "What do you think of Wilson now?" Jackson edged away to cover again. "He's a very fine statesman, and a much bigger man than we thought him once."
"Same here; and he knows his America. He waited and he waited, and all the time the country was just getting more raw about the Germans, and then when he was good and ready he came in; and I guess now he's got the country solid."
Jackson pondered this for a moment, studying the clean-cut young faces—all of the universal "Naval" stamp—around him.
"I don't know," he said slowly, "that it wouldn't have been better for us if we'd been able to stop out a few months ourselves at first. It would have made us more solid too. But we simply had to come in at once."
"You had; and if you hadn't, we'd have talked at you some."
Jackson laughed. "What! 'Too proud to fight,' and all that sort of thing? Yes, we'd have deserved it too. I say, what a shame Admiral Mahan died right at the beginning! There's nobody to take his place and write this war up."
"Yes, he'd have been over here first tap of the gong. And he'd have seen it all for himself, and given you Britishers and us lectures on the war of 1812—and every other war too."
"Yes, it's a great pity. He taught us what sea-power was, and till then we hardly knew we had it at all."
"Well, he taught you enough to get us busy mailing you paper about the blockade last year."
Jackson grinned. "You couldn't say much. You made all the precedents yourselves when you blockaded the South in '61. We only had to refer you to your own letters to get out of the argument."
The First Lieutenant beckoned for the cigar box again. "You knew too much diplomatic work for us in those days. We were new to that card game. But I'd sooner hear our talk now than the sort of gentle breathing of your folks when it comes to diplomacy."
"Never mind," said Jackson. "We're getting better. We'll have an autocracy, like you, before the war's over, instead of the democracy we've got now."
The circle settled down and waited. This was evidently not an unarmed foe, in the ancient Anglo-Saxon game.
"Amurrica's the only real democracy in the universe," said an incautious voice. Two heads turned towards the speaker, and several pairs of eyes spoke volumes.
"I beg your pardon," said Jackson. "America's a great country, but as you told me just now, she's solid. That means she's so keen on getting on with the work that she's chosen a boss and told him to go ahead and give his orders, and so long as he does his best to get on with the work, the people aren't going to quarrel with him. Now we are not really solid, just because we're too much of a democracy."
"Say, you wouldn't think that if you'd been over and seen our last elections; but there's sense in it, all the same. But Lloyd George—isn't he the same sort of Big Stick over here?"
"You read our political papers and see," said Jackson. "Do you take much interest in politics in your Navy?"
"Do we hell—does yours?"
"Not a bit, except to curse at them. Navies are outside politics."
"Except the German's, and their army and navy and politics are all the same thing; and they'll all come down together, too."
"Yes, but it's going to take some tough scrapping to do it. Let's hope no one starts fighting over the corpse when she's beaten."
"Well, I guess you won't, and we won't. We've both got all the land we can do with, and if there are any colonies to hand out after, we won't mind who gets 'em so long as the Kaiser doesn't. What we ought to do is to join England in a policing act for the world, and just keep them all from fighting."
"That'd be no good. The rest of them would combine against us. It would only mean a different Balance of Power."
"Oh! Now you're talking European. We stand out of the old-world Balance."
"You can't now. You've got hitched up in it, and you'll find you're tangled when you want to get back."
"We sure won't. We'll pull out when this round-up's over—you watch us."
The Commander glanced at his watch and rose. "Dinner's at 'half-six,'" he said. "You'd better let me show you the way to your room."
Jackson rose and followed him aft to the spare cabin. "Here you are," said the American. "Hope you'll be comfortable. The boys will do their best to make your stay here real home-like, and I hope you'll stay just as long as you can."
"I sure will, sir," came the answer, in a voice that was fast losing its English drawl; and Jackson, alone with his thoughts, stared at the door-curtain, and wondered why on earth it should have been considered necessary to tell him that a supply of tact would be useful to him in his new job.