“Good egg,” said someone. “Another Hun done in.”
It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that it might not have been a Hun. As a matter of fact it was the Invincible, or all that was left of her.
. . . . .
Outside the lower conning-tower a little group of messengers, electric light and fire and wreckage parties stood and discoursed. They were displaying an unwonted interest in the merits and demerits of swimming belts.
“Got yours on, Nobby?” inquired one boy-messenger of another.
“Yus,” was the reply in tense grave tones. “An’ if we sinks I’m goin’ to save Admiral Jellicoe an’ get the Victoria Cross.”
This pious flight of fancy apparently rather took his friend’s breath away, for there was a moment’s silence.
“You can ’elp,” he added generously. They were “Raggies” apparently....
. . . . .
Reaction came with the following dawn: a weariness of the soul that no fatigue of the flesh can equal. All one’s energies seemed needed to combat the overwhelming desire for sleep, and the sensitive plate which records even absurdities in the mind holds little save one recollection of that dawn. But whatever has grown dim and been forgotten, the memory of a journey aft along the mess-deck in search of a cup of tea will always survive. The grey daylight struggled through the gunports and mingled with the sickly glare of electric lights along the narrow vista of the mess-deck. One watch of stokers had been relieved, and they lay where they had dropped on coming up from the stokehold. On every available inch of space along the deck sprawled a limp bundle of grimy rags that was a man asleep. It was like picking a pathway through a charnel-house of ebon dead. They lay on their backs with outstretched arms, or face downwards with their arms under their foreheads, in every imaginable attitude of jointless, abandoned exhaustion. The warm, sour smell of perspiration mingled with the aftermath of cordite fumes....