Joshua's way of expressing himself may have been crude, but M'Sweeny quite understood what he meant.
The engagement, short as it had been, had given the men confidence in themselves, each other, their officers, and their ship. It had banded them together in some extraordinary and quite inexplicable manner which no years of peace training could have done. Together they had been tried and had not been found wanting; and now, more than ever, they had become 'we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.' They felt themselves inspired with a new patriotism and a new ardour, and it was that very feeling which, on 21st October 1805, had helped their forebears to win the battle of Trafalgar.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE DAY.
I.
All through the peaceful night of 30th May 1916 British squadrons were at sea steaming steadily eastward. Fighting-ships of almost every class were represented; great battleships and battle-cruisers, armoured cruisers of an older type, new and very fast light cruisers, the ubiquitous destroyers in their dozens, all converging silently towards the area on the other side of the North Sea which was presently to become the scene of the mightiest and most terrible battle in British naval history.
The Commander-in-Chief and the Admirals in command of squadrons may possibly have known that something unusual was in the air; but it is doubtful if any subordinate officers or men had the least inkling of what the next day would bring forth. They knew that a battle was always possible, and were ready and anxious for it. Off and on for nearly twenty-two months they had scoured the gray wastes of the North Sea, and had explored its grayer fogs, always hoping that the next dawn would bless their tired eyes with a view of the far-flung battle-line of the enemy stretched out across the horizon before them. But morning after morning the sun had risen to display the same bare and monotonous vista of sea and sky.
Sometimes the ocean was calm and peaceful, the sun shone undimmed, and the blue sky towards the horizon was piled high with mass upon mass of mountainous white cumulus. Sometimes they had fogs, when they could see barely a hundred yards; sometimes the prevailing North Sea mists, in which the visibility alternated between two and five miles. At other times the wind howled, and the leaden sea was whipped into fury by gales; while the sky became overcast with dark clouds and streaked with the white, frayed-out streamers of mares' tails. They had come to know the vagaries of their cruising ground by heart; but whatever its aspect the sea was ever innocent of the one thing they all wished to see—the German High Sea Fleet.
Their wistful longing was just as acute as that of the men in the storm-battered ships of Columbus when straining their eyes towards the western horizon for the first dim blue traces of the new continent; and now, through sheer disappointment, not a few of them had come to believe that the chance they all prayed and longed for would never come.
Daylight on 31st May found the Mariner and many other destroyers still steaming eastward in company with the battle-cruiser fleet under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty in the Lion. Certain light-cruiser squadrons, acting as scouts, were stationed some distance ahead of the heavier vessels. The morning—which had broken beautifully fine, with a calm sea—passed without incident, and it was not until shortly after half-past two in the afternoon that the advanced squadrons reported the enemy in force to the eastward.