A SERVICE OF HUMOURISTS
Things are all too deadly serious and important for any one to insult by taking seriously. Every branch of the Service is forced to be a humourist in spite of itself; and by the time men reach the rank of Captain the least adaptable have some saving sense of fun hammered into them. A Captain remembers fairly well what song the Midshipmen were used to sing about the Lieutenant; what views he held in his own Lieutenancy of his Commander, and what as a Commander he thought of his Captain. If he forgets these matters, as in heat, on lonely stations, or broken with fever some men do, then God help his ship when she comes home with a crop of Court-martials and all hands half crazy!
But to go back to methods of attack. You can hear interesting talk among the juniors when you sit on a man’s bunk of an afternoon, surrounded by the home photographs, with the tin-bath and the shore-going walking sticks slung up overhead. They are very directly concerned in War, for they have charge of the guns, and they speculate at large and carelessly. We (I speak for our cruiser) are not addicted to swear in the words of the torpedo Lieutenant because we do not carry those fittings; but we do all devoutly believe that it is the business of a cruiser to shoot much and often (see Note III). What follows is, of course, nonsense—the merest idle chaff of equals over cigarettes; but rightly read it has its significance.
‘The first thing to do,’ says authority aged Twenty-One, ‘is to be knocked silly by concussion in the conning-tower. Then you revive when all the other chaps are dead, and win a victory off your own bat—à la illustrated papers. ’Wake up in Haslar a month later with your girl swabbing your forehead and telling you you’ve wiped out the whole Fleet.’
‘Catch me in the conning-tower! Not much!’ says Twenty-Three. ‘Those bow-guns of yours will stop every shot that misses it; an’ the upper bridge will come down on you in three minutes.’
‘Don’t see that you’re any better off in the waist. You’d get the funnels and ventilators and all the upper fanoodleums on top of you, anyhow,’ is the retort. ‘We’re a lot too full of wood, even with our boats out of the way.’
‘The poop’s good enough for me,’ says Twenty-Four (that is his station). ‘Fine, light airy place, and we can get our ammunition handier than you can forward.’
‘What’s the use of that?’ says he in charge of the bow guns. ‘You’ve got those beastly deck torpedo-tubes just under you. Fancy a Whitehead smitten on the nose by one little shell. You’d go up.’
‘So’d you. She’d blow the middle out of herself. If they took those tubes away we could have a couple more four-inchers there. There’d be heaps of room for their ammunition in the torpedo magazine.’
GUNS AND TORPEDOES