Probably the first impression that a stranger to all this ship routine gets is that a warship is one of the most discordant places in the world. They are everlastingly blowing bugles, each bugle out of key with all the others. One bugler will sound a lot of hippety-hoppity notes and then another will take up the same refrain with a blare and a mean half note or quarter note variation and then two or three others will join in, on decks, below decks, and the jangling jumble rolls in on your ear drums in such a discord that you feel as if you'd like to punch the man who told 'em to do it. At the same time you see men, hundreds of whom must have no ear for note discrimination, jump to the tasks to which they are summoned and you wonder how they know what the bugles are telling them.
There are ninety-eight of these bugle calls on a man-o'-war and how the men differentiate them passes your understanding. It aggravates you that you can't make them out yourself. You begin to study them and you do get so that you are able to recognize two or three, and then you get lost and you begin to have an admiration for the men who have mastered them all, just as you admire an ironworker who can walk a beam 400 feet in the air. He can do something that you can't do and you respect him for it.
Still you keep trying to master those calls. Finally you learn the trick partly. You associate certain words with certain jingles—perhaps it would be better to say certain jangles—and then you pat yourself on the back and feel that you are pretty nearly half as good as a sailorman in Uncle Sam's navy. The trick is the same as with the army calls and many of the jingles are the same. For example, you soon learn reveillé, for the refrain,
We can't get 'em up; we can't get 'em up;
We can't get 'em up in the morning.
fits the call so completely that one who has once learned it can never forget what it means.
Again when the bugles sound the sick bay call you find yourself unconsciously saying to yourself:
Come and get your quinine, quinine.
When the officers' call for quarters is sounded you feel like saying to the one nearest you:
Get your sword on; get your sword on.