Chapter XV: Camouflage

In the annals of the Navy one may read of many a famous duel, and if the code duello were in existence to-day, I feel certain that the present would not be less fiery than the past. The subject which stirs up all the discussion is camouflage. To ask at a crowded table: "What do you think of camouflage," is to hurl a very apple of discord down among your hosts. For there will be some who will stand by camouflage to the last bright drop of blood, and strive to win you to their mind with tales that do "amaze the very faculties of eyes and ears." You will hear of ships melting into cloud, of vessels apparently going full speed backward, of ships whose funnels have one and all been rendered invisible. And now the mocker is sure to ask the pro-camouflager in the most serious of tones if he ever saw the ship disguised as a sunset which the Germans unhappily discovered on a rainy day. The signal gun of the anti-camouflage squad now having sounded, the assault begins with a demand of "What's your theory?" The pro's reply something about breaking up spaces of colour, optical illusions--"if you draw horizontal lines along a boat's hull, she will appear longer; if you draw vertical or angular parallels, the vessel will appear shorter." The anti's answer that such an expedient might possibly, just possibly, deceive an idiot child for exactly five and one-eighths seconds, as for deceiving a wily Hun,--Good Night! "Do you mean to tell me," cries the devotee of camouflage, growing angry, "that a ship painted one flat, dead colour is less visible against the sea than one whose surface is broken up into many colours?" "Yes, that's what I mean," retorts the anti. "You know as well as I do that a thing that looks like Vesuvius in eruption is ten times more easily seen than a boat painted a dull neutral grey."

"Yes," cries some one else, "but hasn't camouflage on land proved its utility?" "I'm talking about naval camouflage," answers the anti. "On land your camouflaged object is usually stationary itself, and stands in relation to a surface which is always stationary,--the surrounding landscape. Out here, both surfaces, sea and vessel, are constantly in motion and constantly changing their relation to each other." "But I _saw_ a boat--" begins a pro. "Oh, cut it out," cries somebody else wholeheartedly, and the discussion ends exactly where a thousand others have ended.

Whether camouflage be valuable or not, it certainly is the fad of the hour. The good, old-fashioned, one-colour boat has practically disappeared from the seas, and the ships that cross the ocean in these perilous times have been docked to make a cubist holiday; the futurists are saving democracy. There are countless tricks. I remember seeing one boat with a false water line floating in a painted sea whose roaring waves contrasted oddly with a frightfully placid horizon, and I recall another with the silhouette of a schooner painted on her side. I remember a little tramp remorselessly striped, funnels and all with alternate slanting bands of apple-green and snuff brown; I have an indistinct memory of a terrible mess of milky-pink, lemon-yellow and rusty black, which earned for the vessel displaying it the odious title of "The Boil." We saw the prize monstrosity in midocean. Every school of camouflage had evidently had a chance at her. She was striped, she was blotched; she was painted in curves; she was slashed with jagged angles; she was bone grey; she was pink; she was purple; she was green; she was blue; she was egg yellow. To see her was to gasp and turn aside. We had quite a time picking a suitable name for her, but finally decided on the Conscientious Objector, though her full title was "The State of Mind of a C.O. on Being Sent to the Front."

Finally destiny put in my path just the man I wanted to see, the captain of a British submarine. "What do you think of camouflage?" I asked.

"Well," he answered, after a pause, "I can't remember that it ever hindered us from seeing a ship. Visibility at sea strikes me as being more a matter of mass than of colour. The optical illusion tricks are too priceless silly. Must amuse the Huns. You see if the eye does play him false, Fritz detects the error with his gauges."

The P.C's, I am sure, will put this down as a bit of typical submarine "side." Indignant letters, care H.M.S. X999.