A NAVAL DISCUSSION.
The air was thick with smoke, and a half-circle of officers sat clustered round the stove in the smoking-room. True—there was no fire in the stove, but that did not count. A stove was a place you sat around and jerked cigarette ash at, or, if you were long enough, rested your heels on. The party consisted of six ship's officers and a guest. A few feet away a Bridge-party was in progress. It was the usual Naval party, and was composed of one man who could play, two who thought they could, and one who had come in in response to urgent demands to "make up a four," and who held no illusions about his own play or his partner's. However, he argued well, which was a help. The game appeared to go in spasms—a few minutes' peace punctuated only by subdued oaths, and then a cross-fire of abuse and recriminations—usually opened by the fourth player, who had somewhere learnt the wonderful feminine art of getting in first accusation, and then dodging his opponents' salvoes behind a smoke-screen of side-issues.
The group by the stove were not in the least disturbed by the game behind them. They had heard Naval Bridge played before, and knew that it was only when the players became polite that trouble was in the offing. The talk, as always, was of the War, and swung with startling suddenness from one queer aspect to another. The Senior Engineer was leaning back in his chair, his pipe between his teeth, listening to the mixture of views and voices from either side of him.
"What do they want this saluting order at all for? They're making everybody salute everybody in London now, and they say it isn't safe to walk down the Haymarket to the Admiralty, because the traffic stands to attention for you."
"All damn nonsense. There's too much saluting—that sort, I mean—and there's too little of the other sort. Let's have an order that every civilian must salute a wounded man, or a man with a wound stripe, and then I'll take Provost-Marshal and see it done."
"They'd chuck their hands in. They're all talking of Democracy now, and a wounded man would count as a gilded autocrat."
"Democracy, my foot! I know their sort of Democracy. It's like Russia's special brand—do as you please, and make all you can for yourself. A civilian's no good till he's a conscript or done his time in the Territorials. If they want democracy they can come here. This is the most democratic Service in the world."
"But you can't run down civilians over this war; why—the whole Army's civilian now. They haven't done so badly, though they had to wait for war before they moved."
"Whose fault was it they didn't help before? It wasn't ours. But that's just what I'm saying. They're all right once they've been drilled, but no damn good till they have been. We ought to put the whole lot through a short course of drill and a week of trench work, and let them go again."