“He stretched out his dead cold face
And he sailed in the grand old way!
The fishes had taken an eye and an arm,
But he swept Trafalgar’s Bay.
“Nelson—was Francis Drake!
O, what matters the uniform,
Or the patch on your eye or your pinned-up sleeve,
If your soul’s like a North Sea storm?”
When the author was in Devonshire a little while after the outbreak of the world-war he was talking to an old sailor who had seen service, now retired at the age of nearly eighty years. He stood on the red cliffs beyond Brixham close to the doors of his cottage straining his eyes, still clear and bright, seaward, watching for the ships he loved.