“All right; I’ll come right over,” was the answer. In a few minutes more they were chatting away in the privacy of Evans’s room.
Evans described the general condition of the base at Punta Delgada, the destroyer flotilla and the fleet as a whole, and in less than an hour he presented a more effective survey than Mortimer could have got from a month’s intensive study of official reports. The fleet was revealed as an organization in its true perspective. When Evans came to the chief of staff, he waxed truly eloquent. Mortimer had listened to the ablest lawyers and political orators, he had heard the most famous after-dinner speakers, but never had he heard so many artistic combinations of derogatory terms as Evans assembled to convey his impressions of Captain Brigham.
“Sounds as if you had a grudge against the poor fellow,” said Mortimer.
“I’ve got a grudge, all right,” answered Evans. “Whether I’m biased by it is another question. I worried myself sick over it for a day and a half, and every angle I could view it from I came to the same conclusion. He’s getting the coördination of the fleet so undermined that in action it would hardly be worth the powder to blow it off the map, and that would be forthcoming damn quick from the enemy. It is all right on parade, but in action we should be up against the enemy’s team-work, which is marvelous; the best organized business in the world isn’t in it compared with them. We should be like a man with half a brain. The coördinating mechanism is so crippled, we shouldn’t stand the chance of the proverbial celluloid dog chasing the asbestos cat through hell. The radio business is enough to damn him, but in addition I found evidence that he’s doing his best to get the gunnery back to where it was in the pre-Sims days—fine on paper, rotten in practice. He’s a first-class stuffed shirt, and the quicker you can scrap him the better.”
“What about the Admiral?” asked Mortimer. “Isn’t he a pretty good sort? And how does he stand his offending chief of staff?”
“The Admiral is a good man,” said Evans. “He is well-trained, standing high in his profession, has fine qualities of leadership, maintains good discipline, and is universally liked and respected. It is a great thing for the morale of the fleet to have such a man at the head. He has a good military personality, but he is a bit old-fashioned, and is rather short on imagination. He doesn’t adapt himself readily to new conditions, but, of course, that’s hard for any man of his age. He will do the obvious very well; but I wish he had a little keener perception. Now this stuffed club, Brigham, is the finest ever at keeping up good military form and appearances; the flagship is a very ‘smart ship’ to look at.
“The Admiral has a touch of the old-fashioned weakness for that sort of thing, and he doesn’t know quite enough about the detail of modern methods to see how rotten things are below the surface. You see, he was trained in the days before those things which modern developments have forced us to rely on had become vital. Consequently, he doesn’t quite know how to probe his organization and make sure the details are well attended to. He relies on his chief of staff, and it’s pretty hard for him to do otherwise. He ought to have a keen, alert, adaptable chief of staff with a real head; then he’d be all right.”
Evans then told of Fraser and his experience with him on the submarine hunt. He told how he had searched through the destroyer flotilla and later through the fleet looking for men of real brains and capacity for generalship, and how Fraser had seemed to him to stand head and shoulders above the rest.
“There’s the ideal man for chief of staff,” he said. “With his tact and personality he would quickly win the Admiral’s confidence, and with Fraser at his right hand all the Admiral’s good qualities of leadership would stand out at their best. They’d make a splendid combination; Fraser would be the brains, Admiral Johnson the embodiment of authority and formal leadership which would carry weight with the personnel at large, and give the necessary moral support to make Fraser’s skill effective.”
They continued thrashing out the question and discussing it from every possible angle till Mortimer was as firmly convinced as Evans that the salvation of the fleet lay in replacing Brigham with Fraser.