I begin by being heartfelt in my thankfulness to a benign Providence for being capable yesterday, September 13th, 1919, of enjoying suet pudding and treacle with a pleasure equal to that which I quite well remember, of having suet pudding and treacle on July 4th, 1854, when I went on board H.M.S. “Victory,” 101 guns, the flagship at Trafalgar of Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson. Yes! my thankfulness, I hope, is equal to but hardly as wonderful as that of the almost toothless old woman who, being commiserated with, replied: “Yes, I only ’as two left; but thank God they meet!” So I say, to express the same thankfulness with all my heart for the years that remain to me, though I have all my teeth—or nearly all—notwithstanding that I have not had even one single “thank you” for anything that I have done since King Edward died. Nevertheless, I thank that same God as the old woman thanked, Who don’t let a sparrow fall without a purpose and without knowledge.
I have no doubt the slight has done me a lot of good!
I thought at the age of nineteen, when I was Acting Captain of H.M.S. “Coromandel,” that I never could again be so great. Please look at my picture then. It’s a very excellent one—rather pulled down at the corners of the mouth even then. (The child is father to the man.) And though now nearly as old as Dandolo I don’t feel any greater than at 19. Dandolo after an escapade at the Dardanelles similar to mine, became conqueror of Byzantium at 80 years of age. And Justinian’s two Generals, Belisarius and Narses, were over 70. Dolts don’t realise that the brain improves while the body decays—provided of course that the original brain is not that of a congenital idiot, or of an effete poltroon who never will run risks.
“Risks and strife” are the bread of Life to a growing brain.
I beg the reader of this dictation to believe that, whatever he may hear to the contrary (and he probably will), though swaggering as I did just now at suet-puddening at 79 as efficiently as at nineteen, yet I do daily realise what that ancient monk wrote in the year 800, when he studied the words of Job—that “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time” compared to eternity, and death may be always near the door; and no words are more beautiful in connection therewith than when a parting friend at the moment of departure makes us say: “Teach us who survive in this and other like daily spectacles of mortality to see how frail and uncertain our own condition is.”
First of all in this Recapitulation comes back to me a prophecy I ventured at that age of 19 I have just mentioned—that the next great war that we should have at sea would be a war of young men. And how beautifully this is illustrated by the letter received only a few days ago from that boy in Russia (see [Chapter IV]) where two battleships were sent to the bottom and the British sailors in command were only Lieutenants. And in passing one cannot help paying a tribute to the Subalterns on shore. General Sir Henry Rawlinson said lately: “Those who really won the war were the young Company Leaders and the Subalterns,” and pathetic was the usual Gazette notice of those killed:
“Second Lieutenants unless otherwise mentioned.”
There was little “otherwise!” So has it been in the Navy, at Zeebrugge and elsewhere.
There is, however, a very splendid exception—when all hands, old and young, went to the bottom; and that is in the magnificent Merchant Navy of the British Nation. Seven million tons sank under these men, and the record of so many I’ve seen who were saved was: “Three times torpedoed.” And remember! for them no Peerage or Westminster Abbey. They didn’t even get paid for the clothes they lost, and their pay stopped the day the ship was sunk. Except in the rare cases where the shipowner was the soul of generosity, like my friend Mr. Petersen, who paid his men six months or a year to do nothing after such a catastrophe. But we go with Mr. Havelock Wilson: “We hope to change all that.” For who is going to deny, when we all stand up for them, that the Merchant Navy shall be incorporated in the Navy of the Nation and with all the rights and money and rank and uniform and widows’ pensions and pensions in old age? All this has to come; and I am Mr. Havelock Wilson’s colleague in that matter, as he was mine in that wonderful feeding and clothing of our thousands of British Merchant sailor prisoners, who didn’t, for some damned red tape reason, come within the scope of the millions of money in that enormous Prince of Wales’s Fund, and the Red Cross.
Somebody will have to be a martyr, perhaps it’s me. And I expect I am going to be burnt at the stake for saying these things; but in those immortal words of the past “I shall light the candle!” Isn’t it just too lovely—when Bishop Latimer, as the flames shot up around him at the stake in Oxford in A.D. 1555, cried to his brother Bishop, equally burning: