“I’d just done with three other young gentlemen,” the cabman went on, “when I came back to the stand to catch more of ’em off this train.”
“Well, you’ve caught one,” Lynwood said, with a smile at the phrase.
“The mare, she’s bin servin’ ’is Majesty to-day, she ’as. Old army pensioner, she is.” He shook a stream of water from his oilskin cape and ran his hand over his dripping beard. “Old sailor meself, sir,” he remarked, as he picked up the reins.
Lynwood settled himself among the thin cushions as the cab’s loose wheels rattled into the street. This, in his childhood’s dreams, was to have been the beginning of adventure—this “going to sea.” It was not thus he had imagined it. The books he had read had conjured up pictures of bright sunshine and blue water, of admirals who welcomed the new-comer in a fatherly manner, of petty officers whose ambition it was to teach him knots, splices, and cutlass drill. All this was to have been but a prelude to a life among friends, who would share with him glories, perils, and promotion, and whose kindliness would make all things pleasant for him in strange and gaily coloured lands. And now, looking forward, he saw none of these delights. His experience at Osborne and Dartmouth and, above all, in the training cruiser had taught him what he might reasonably expect. He had done well as a cadet. He had taken firsts in his passing-out examinations, and—for what it was worth—had been a Cadet Captain in both colleges. There was no reason why his promotion should not be as rapid as that of any of his contemporaries. But the element of romance had to be excluded—unless there were a war. Those who had lived through it had given him to understand, with a clearness that could permit of no further disillusionment, that the naval officer’s life was as mechanical and monotonous as that of a book-keeping clerk. There were drills and watches, tactical exercises and coaling. There was a discipline of iron, and a requirement, equally inelastic, of absolute efficiency. Faults were not pardoned nor weaknesses forgotten. Motive was a matter of small account, for only success and failure appeared on the final balance-sheet.
This, Lynwood had come to recognize, was inevitable in a service conducted with one object alone, the object of victory in battle. Never, even in the bitterest of criticisms, had he heard one word against the Navy’s efficiency. It was a perfect machine, as inhuman as a machine, as pitiless as perfection. The object of its training was the production of a war personnel, and this implied the production of human beings who possessed certain definite qualities and in whom certain qualities were not found. If a required quality were lacking it had to be instilled; if a surplus quality were present it had to be removed. The process was often painful. Not infrequently men were broken by it, and went; or rebelled against it in their hearts, and went likewise. Many, though broken, were forced by circumstances to remain.
Lynwood remembered having asked the officer who had given him this summary of the naval system how it was, then, that so many of the officers he had met at the colleges had been visibly happy, and, within certain limits, contented. “To start with,” his informant had replied, “the officers who are appointed to Osborne and Dartmouth are picked men—men who, because they were born with most of the required qualities, haven’t had their natures badly damaged. The colleges are star billets. You don’t meet there—or, for that matter, in the society from which most civilians draw their conclusions—the two and a half stripe salt-horses who will never become commanders or the engineers who have sweated their souls out for the sake of a family which attains the ultimate glory of a Portsmouth suburb—in short, the underworld of H.M.S. And you don’t meet the drunks. But there’s another reason. The Service does its training young, on the principle of flog a dog while it’s a puppy. And if you get through that stage—well, you’re probably shaped to the mould like the Chinese women’s feet, and you forget, and it doesn’t do you any fresh hurt. But if you break while the pressure is being applied, you break—that’s all. A good thing you broke so soon. If you can’t afford to leave it, the Service has your measure. It knows you broke, and your promotion is not rapid.... Of course,” he added, “there are a few who are neither broken nor shaped. They go on in the Navy, successful up to a point, dabbling in something else they might have been masters of. Or else they go—often too late.”
And now Lynwood looked forward to the inevitable pressure of the mould. It was applied, he knew, to junior officers for the Service’s and their own good. The customary phrase was: “Junior snotties must be shaken.” The system was unofficial; indeed, its more obvious extremes had been expressly forbidden; but it was a recognized system, of whose existence the whole Navy was aware. No protest against it—and this had been particularly impressed on cadets—would gain any sympathy from any rank. So the Navy had been created, and so it must continue. Conditions, said the senior officers, were much better than in Nelson’s time—much better, indeed, than in their own days as midshipmen. Comparatively, modern midshipmen were wrapped up in cotton-wool. The senior officers, in their Wardroom armchairs, didn’t know what the Service was coming to!
Some captains, it was rumoured, made a stand against the system in their own ships, on the ground that it was not, in fact, essential to the efficiency of the Service. Some sub-lieutenants, too—and they had more control in this matter than any captain—stood out against the system in their own Mess, simply because cruelty disgusted them. But these well-intentioned people dared not proselytize. They resisted the system quietly within their own domain, and, lest they should be considered old women, said as little as possible about their resistance. Their number was said to be increasing. Whether a junior midshipman did or did not experience the extremes of the system depended nowadays on the ship to which he was appointed and the sub-lieutenant who ruled his Gunroom. The system, to the accompaniment of the shaking of many conservative heads, was said to be dying.
But it was by no means dead. Lynwood had decided that, if he was subjected to it, the system should not break him. After all, its greatest violence was unlikely to last more than a year. In his second year he would be partly exempt from it; in his third, he would be in a position to enforce it, if he wished, upon others.
The cab drew up at the hotel door. As he stood on the pavement fumbling for money he looked out across the harbour. The railings were jewelled with raindrops. Beyond them a sea of dull green tossed itself into livid foam and spray. Further from shore all colour was lost. No horizon was distinguishable from the opaque sky. Once he thought there became visible the ghostly form of a warship, infinitely lonely and apart, but a moment later he could see nothing.