The men of the American destroyers and submarines, working more by themselves than the battleships with the Grand Fleet, have seen rather less of the British bluejacket, and—with better opportunities for London leave—more of the British civilians than their mates in the latter units. They have all found much to entertain and interest them in Liverpool, London, Glasgow and the other large cities they have visited. They have enjoyed the theatres and art galleries, and are very appreciative of the various canteens that have been provided for their comfort. But it has been none of these that has made the greatest appeal to them, but rather those at first rare but now increasingly frequent visits to an English or a Scottish home. I don't mean the boat-on-the-river-with-band and the tea-party-on-the-lawn-of-some-ancestral-castle kind of thing, which are all very well as far as they go; but rather the quiet, unostentatious hospitality of a British home of somewhere near the same class as the visitor comes from in the States. This kind of kindness has gone straight to the heart. The Yankee sailor lad is a good deal more of a "mother's boy" than he will ever admit to any one save possibly some other boy's mother, and I have heard two or three pretty swaggery young "gobs" speak with rather more than a suggestion of a catch in their voices of the kindness that has been shown them—of the things they have seen and heard and learned—in one of these visits to a British home.
One day a quartermaster—his folding bed was triced up next to mine in the forward torpedo-flat, and we had fallen into the habit of exchanging confidences in the long quiet hours of submergence—of the American submarine in which I was recently out on its regular North Atlantic patrol told me how much the visit he had been privileged to make to a little English home in Liverpool had meant to him. And presently, after a pause, as though the thought of one had awakened the thought of the other in his mind, he told me of something else he had seen on one of his leave trips.
"I happened to be in Cork for a few hours on my way through," he said. "We are not allowed to visit there, you know, for fear that we may be tempted to beat up a few Sinn Feiners; but if we are marooned there waiting for a connexion there is nothing against our strolling about the town. Well, just at one end of the main bridge across the River Lee, they have the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack floating side by side from the top of one of the iron poles of the electric car line. I don't know whose idea it was, except that the Sinn Feiners had nothing to do with it. Now the ordinary way to have handled them would have been to bend each flag to separate halyards, and to hoist and lower independently. But some man with a head on his shoulders (possibly he had been a sailor) evidently had the run of the show, and what had been done was this: Taking two crosspieces, he had bent the flags to the two lines joining their ends. Then a single halyard, rigged to run over a block to the upper crosspiece, hoisted and lowered the two flags, always side by side, at one operation. Well, now, looking at that, it chanced that I seemed to see something more than a very neat little contrivance for saving time in handling a couple of squares of coloured bunting. It seemed to me that it stood for a sort of symbol of the fact that the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack are being rigged to fly together for a good many years; and that they aren't going to be able to lower one without bringing down the other."
I do not know how many of the men of the American ships at the Irish bases have seen that particular little "bunting hoist," but I do know that the sentiment my young submarine friend read into it finds an echo in the breast of practically every one of them.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED.
LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND.
Transcriber's notes:
The following is a list of changes made to the original. The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
for'rard, wait till there was an interval in both
for'ard, wait till there was an interval in both
puttin' that blinkin' pyrit down to Davy Jones."'
puttin' that blinkin' pyrit down to Davy Jones."'"
than they had been right along up to them. We
than they had been right along up to then. We