The Gunnery Lieutenant made a gesture of deprecation. "The watchkeepers insist on keeping the settee to caulk on in the intervals of hogging in their cabins. The piano was retained for the benefit of the Young Doctor. He can play Die Wacht am Rhein with one finger—can't you, Pills?"
The Young Doctor beamed with simple pride. "My sister's German governess taught me when I was a kid," he explained. "We have it every night—it's the only tune I know."
"The sideboard is to support the empty glasses of the bridge-players after the Padre has put down one of his celebrated 'no-trumps' hands—we had to keep the sideboard. The arm-chair is for Number One to sit in and beat time while his funny party chip paint off the bulkheads." The Gunnery Lieutenant looked round. "And so on, and so on—oh, the gramophone? Bunje bu'st all the records except three, and we're getting to know those rather well. But as you're a guest, old thing, would you like 'Tipperary,' Tosti's 'Good-bye,' or 'A Little Grey Home in the West'?"
The corporal of the ward-room servants interrupted these amenities with the announcement that dinner was ready, and a general move was made to the table.
Thereafter the conversation flowed evenly and generally. It was not confined to war. The men who make war, either afloat or ashore, do not talk about it over-much. There are others—even in this England of ours—by tradition better qualified to do the talking, in that they see most of the game. . . . On the whole, perhaps, more "shop" was discussed than would have been the case in peace-time, but for the most part it eddied round much the same subjects as Wardroom conversation always does, with the Indiarubber Man's Puck-like humour and gay mock-cynicism running through it like a whimsical pattern in an otherwise conventional design.
War had been their trade in theory from earliest youth. They were all on nodding terms with Death. Indeed, most of the men round the long table had looked him between the eyes already, and the obituary pages in the Navy List had been a reminder, month by month, of others who had looked there too—and blinked, and closed their eyes—shipmates and fleetmates and familiar friends.
War was the Real Thing, that was all. There was nothing about it to obsess men's minds. You might say it was the manoeuvres of 19— all over again, with the chance of "bumping a mine" thrown in, and also the glorious certainty of ultimately seeing a twelve-inch salvo pitch exactly where the long years of preparation ordained that it should.
A submarine specialist, whom the war caught doing exile in a "big ship," dominated the conversation for a while with lamentations that he was constrained to dwell in the Tents of Kedah. Two minutes of his talk having nearly convinced everyone that the sole raison d'être of the big ship was to be sunk by submarine attack, he and his theories passed into a conversational siding. The watchkeepers exchanged mutual condolences on the exasperating tactics of drift-net trawlers, notes on atmospheric conditions prevalent in the North Sea, methods of removing nocturnal cocoa-stains from the more vital portions of a chart, and other matters of interest to watchkeepers.
The Commander and the First Lieutenant of the What Ho's discussed the training of setters. The Young Doctor and his opposite number, and those near them found interest in morphia syringes, ventilation of distributing stations, and—a section of the talk whirling into a curious backwater—the smell of cooking prevalent in the entrance halls of Sheerness lodging-houses. . . .
The dinner went its course: they drank, sitting (as was their privilege and tradition), the King's health. Then the cigarettes went round, chairs turned a little sideways, the port circulated a second time. The conversation was no longer general. In pairs or by threes, according to taste, temperament or individual calling, the members of the mess and their guests settled down to a complacent enjoyment of the most pleasant half-hour in a battleship's long day.