[II. LIFE IN THE FLEET]
[A BATTLESHIP AT SEA]
The collier had come alongside a little after seven—two hours before daybreak at that time of year—and I awoke in my cabin on the boat deck just abaft the forward turret to the grind of the winches and the steady tramp-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the decks below.
On my way aft to the wardroom for breakfast, I stopped for a moment by a midships hatch, where the commander, grimed to the eyes, stamped his sea-boots and threshed his arms as a substitute for the warming exercise the men were getting behind the shovels and the barrows. He it was who was responsible—partly through systematisation, partly through infusing his own energetic spirit into the men themselves—for the fact that the Zeus held the Blue Ribbon, or the Black Ribbon, or whatever one would call the premier honours of the Grand Fleet for speedy coaling. Not unnaturally, therefore, he was a critical man when it came to passing judgment on the shifting of "Number 1 Welsh Steam" from hold to bunkers, and it was not necessarily to be expected that he would echo my enthusiasm when I told him that this was quite the smartest bit of coaling I had ever seen west of Nagasaki, something quite worth standing, shivering tooth to tooth, with a raw north wind, to be a witness of.
"It's fair," he admitted grudgingly, "only fair. A shade over 300 tons an hour, perhaps. 'Twould have seemed good enough before we put up the Grand Fleet record of 408. Trouble is, they haven't anything to put 'em on their mettle this morning. Now, if some other ship had come within fifty or sixty tons of their record this last week, or if we'd had a rush order to get ready to go to sea—then you might have hoped to see coaling that was coaling."
All through my porridge and eggs and bacon the steady tramp of the barrow-men on the forecastle-deck throbbed along the steel plates of the wardroom ceiling, and it must have been about the time I was spreading my marmalade (real marmalade, not the synthetic substitute one comes face to face with ashore these days) that I seemed to sense a quickening of the movement, not through any rush-bang acceleration, but rather through gradually becoming aware of increased force in action, as when the engines of a steamer speed up from "half" to "full." In a few moments an overalled figure, with a face coal-dusted till it looked like the face of the end-man in a minstrel show, lounged in to remark casually behind the day before yesterday morning's paper that we had just gone on "two hours' notice." A half-hour later, as the gouged-out collier edged jerkily away under the impulse of her half-submerged screw, the commander, a gleam of quiet satisfaction in his steady eyes, remarked that "it wasn't such a bad finish, after all," adding that "the men seemed keen to get her out to sea and let the wind blow through her."
The ship's post-coaling clean up—usually as elaborate an affair as a Turkish bath, with rub down and massage—was no more than a douche with "a lick and a promise." Anything more for a warship putting off into the North Sea in midwinter would be about as superfluous as for a man to wash his face and comb his hair before taking a plunge in the surf.
Once that perfunctory wash-down was over, all traces of rush disappeared. What little remained to be done after that—even including getting ready for action—was so ordered and endlessly rehearsed that nothing short of an enemy salvo or a sea heavy enough to carry away something of importance need be productive of a really hurried movement. Just a shade more smoke from the funnels to indicate the firing of furnaces which had been lying cold, and the taking down or in of a few little harbour "comforts" like stove-pipes and gangways, forecasted imminent departure.
The expression regarding the fleet, squadron, or even the single ship ready to sail at a moment's notice is as much of a figure of speech as is the similar one about the army which is going to fight to the last man. A good many moments must inevitably elapse between the time definite orders come to sail and the actual getting under weigh. But the final preparations can be reduced to such a routine that the ship receiving them can be got ready to sail with hardly more than a ripple of unusual activity appearing in the ebb and flow of the life of those who man her. No river ferry-boat ever cast off her moorings and paddled out on one of her endlessly repeated shuttlings with less apparent effort than the Zeus, when, after gulping some scores of fathoms of Gargantuan anchor chain into her capacious maw, she pivoted easily around in the churning boil of reversed screws, took her place in line, and followed in the wake of the flagship toward the point where a notch in the bare rounded periphery of encircling hills marked the way to the open sea.