V.—“Buying up Opportunities.”
The words I take to head this section are as applicable to the affairs of common life as they are to religion, with reference to which they were originally spoken.
What these words signify is that Faith governs all things. Victories on Earth have as their foundation the same saving virtue of Faith.
One great exercise of Faith is “Redeeming the Time,” as Paul says. (I’m told the literal meaning of the original Greek is “buying up opportunities.”) Most people from want of Faith won’t try again. Lord Kelvin often used to tell me of his continuous desire of “redeeming the time.” Even in dressing himself he sought every opportunity of saving time (so he told me) in thinking of the next operation. However his busy brain sometimes got away from the business in hand, as he once put his necktie in his pocket and his handkerchief round his neck. (Another wonderfully clever friend of mine, who used to think in the Differential Calculus, I once met immaculately dressed, but he had his trousers over his arm and not on.) And yet I am told he was an extraordinarily acute business man. Every sailor owes him undying gratitude for his “buying up opportunities” in the way he utilised a broken thigh, which compelled him to go in a yacht, to invent his marvellous compass and sounding machine. At the Bombardment of Alexandria the firing of the eighty ton guns of the “Inflexible” with maximum charges, which blew my cap off my head and nearly deafened me, had no effect on his compasses, and enabled us with supreme advantage to keep the ship steaming about rapidly and so get less often hit whilst at the same time steering the ship with accuracy amongst the shoals. So it was with the ancient sounding machine: one had to stop the ship to sound, and it was a laborious operation and inaccurate. Lord Kelvin devised a glass tube which by the height of the discoloration gave you the exact depth, no matter how fast the ship was going; and the beauty of it was you kept the tubes as a register.
It was an immense difficulty getting the Admiralty to adopt Lord Kelvin’s compass. I was reprimanded for having them on board. I always asked at a Court-Martial, no matter what the prisoner was being tried for, whether they had Lord Kelvin’s compass on board. It was only ridicule that got rid of the old Admiralty compass. At the inquiry the Judge asked me whether the Admiralty compass was sensitive (I was a witness for Lord Kelvin). I replied, “No, you had to kick it to get a move on.” But what most scandalised the dear old Fossil who then presided over the Admiralty compass department was that I wanted to do away with the points of the compass and mark it into the three hundred and sixty degrees of the circle (you might as well have asked them to do away with salt beef and rum!). There could then never be any mistake as to the course the ship should steer. However, a landsman won’t understand the beauty of this simplicity, and the “Old Salts” said at that time “There he is again—the d—d Revolutionary!”
But to revert to “buying up opportunities”: I know no more signal instance of the goodness of Paul’s advice both to the Ephesians and Colossians in things temporal as in things spiritual than as exemplified by the Gunnery Lieutenant of the “Inflexible” in discovering a fracture in one of her eighty-ton guns. He was always thinking ahead in everything—“Buying up Opportunities.”
After the Bombardment of Alexandria we two were walking along the shore; he stopped and said, “Hullo! that’s a bit of one of our shell, and it burst in the bore of the gun.” As there were no end of pieces of burst shell about, which had exploded in striking the fort, I said, “How do you know it is?” He pointed to the marks of the rifling on the shell, which showed that it had burst in the bore and had been pressed into the grooves of the rifling, instead of being rotated by the copper band on its passage through the bore. Then he put his hand in his pocket, took out his clinometer, laid it on the marks of the rifling on the bit of burst shell; and the rifling of our eighty-ton guns having an increasing spiral, he calculated the exact spot in the gun where the shell had burst. And when he got on board he had himself shoved up the bore of the gun holding a piece of hot gutta percha, like that with which the dentist takes the impression of your mouth for a set of false teeth, and brought me out the impression of where the gun had been cracked by the explosion of the shell. Younghusband was his name—perhaps the most gifted man I ever met, but, as unusual with genius, he was not indolent and was always practising himself in seizing opportunities. When the constituted authorities came to inspect the gun, though Younghusband put the broken bit of shell before them, they took a long time to find that crack. One night at Portsmouth someone told Younghusband, who was having his third glass of port after dinner, that he was too fat to walk. For a considerable bet he got up there and then and walked seventy-two miles to London. Younghusband never went to any school in his life; he never left home; he never had a governess or a tutor. He was taught by his mother.
VI.—How the Great War was Carried on.
Six weeks after I left the Admiralty on May 22nd, 1915—that deplorable day, the particulars of which I am not at present at liberty to mention—I received most cordial letters from both Mr. Asquith and Mr. Balfour welcoming me to fill a Post of great magnitude.
