“Meaning dull,” said a battleship in the nearest line. “I’ll not deny we are. You’ll be dull in about three years’ time if we’re still here. But I must say you’ve brightened things up for us no end.”
“That so? Waal ... you put us wise first. Guess we were children at some of the monkey-tricks you call tactics.”
The battleships murmured polite indistinctnesses, and one or two remembered things that happened in the later days of 1914 when war was still in process of becoming a reality to their serried squadrons.
“Wait a bit,” said the American flagship. “We ain’t blooded yet. You ain’t properly blooded yet. No, boys, Jutland was a game of tag to what we’ll face together one of these days.”
“How long, how long?” rumbled down the lines of the battle fleet.
“Quien sabe? That’s what they say down Manilla. You don’t know Manilla though, I guess. But when it comes—it’ll be——”
“Our turn!” interrupted a clear, quiet voice in under the lee of one of the islands. It proceeded apparently from a row of low-lying shadows on the surface of the water. “We’ve done some waiting too.” An ocean-going submarine was talking. “Quiet and deep ... down among the flatfish and the mine moorings where you never go—er—at least we hope you’ll never go. Off the Terschellings ... Heligoland Bight ... the mouth of the Ems. Coming up to breathe at night with a conning-tower awash among the wave-tops ... letting the little ships go by in the hope of bagging a big one.... We can teach you how to wait, my masters, we of the Watch Below.”
It was a long sentence for a submarine, accustomed as they are to holding their breath rather than to waste it in mere conversation. It is their pent-up breath that spits the deadly torpedo at its quarry a couple of miles away.
The battleships were silent. They didn’t altogether like the reference to flatfish and mine moorings and depths their keels left undisturbed in their majestic passage.
A seaplane-carrier chuckled out of the darkness, where she lay like a hen with her brood under her wing. “I don’t know whether you submarines are trying to make us surface craft feel uncomfortable, but I could tell you a story or two about what goes on in the air that would make you feel giddy—very giddy indeed.”