Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

In the old House of Commons a bench at the back of the Strangers’ Gallery was by special favour appropriated to the reporters. The papers represented paid the doorkeepers a fee of three guineas a session. As they numbered something over threescore this was a source of snug revenue in supplement to the strangers’ tributary half-crown. Ladies were not admitted to the Strangers’ Gallery. The only place whence they could partly see, and imperfectly hear, what was going on was by looking down through a large hole in the ceiling immediately above the principal candle-stocked chandelier. This aperture was the principal means of ventilating the House, and the ladies circled round it regardless of the egress of vitiated air. Mr. Gladstone, who sat in the old House as member for Newark, once told me that during progress with an important debate he saw a fan fluttering down from the ceiling. It had dropped from the hand of one of the ladies, who suddenly found herself in a semi-asphyxiated condition. Something more than half a century later Mr. Gladstone was unconsciously the object of attention from another group of ladies indomitable in desire to hear an historic speech. On the night of the introduction of the first Home Rule Bill there was overflowing demand for seats in the Ladies’ Gallery. When accommodation was exhausted, the wife of the First Commissioner of Works happily remembered that the floor of the House is constructed of open iron network, over which a twine matting is laid. These cover the elaborate machinery by which fresh air is constantly let into the Chamber, escaping by apertures near the ceiling. Standing or walking along the Iron Gallery that spans the vault, it is quite easy to hear what is going on in the House. Here, on the invitation of the First Commissioner’s wife, were seated a company of ladies who, unseen, their presence unsuspected, heard every word of the Premier’s epoch-making speech.

‘Q’ incidentally records details of procedure in marked contrast with that of to-day. In these times, on the assembling of a newly elected Parliament, the Oath is administered by the Clerk to members standing in batches at small tables on the floor of the House. In the old Parliament, members were sworn in by the Lord Steward of His Majesty’s Household. At the same period a new Speaker being duly elected or re-elected was led by the Mover and Seconder from his seat to the Bar, whence he was escorted to the Chair. To-day he is conducted direct to the Chair. When divisions were taken in Committee of the whole House, members did not, as at present, go forth into separate lobbies. The ‘ayes’ ranged themselves to the right of the Speaker’s Chair, the ‘noes’ to the left, and were counted accordingly. The practice varied when the House was fully constituted, the Speaker in the Chair and the Mace on the Table. In such circumstances one only of the contending parties, the ‘ayes’ or the ‘noes’ according to the nature of the business in question, quitted the Chamber. The tellers first counted those remaining in the House, and then, standing in the passage between the Bar and the door, counted the others as they re-entered. The result of the division was announced in the formula: ‘The ayes that went out are’ so many. ‘The noes who remained are’ so many, or otherwise according to the disposition of the opposing forces. A quorum then as now was forty, but when the House was in Committee the presence of eight members sufficed. ‘Q’ makes no reference to the use of a bell announcing divisions. But he mentions occasions on which the Mace was sent to Westminster Hall, the Court of Request, or to the several Committee Rooms to summon members to attend.

At the period of Parliamentary history of which ‘Q’ is the lively chronicler, the ceremony of choosing a Speaker and obtaining Royal Assent to the choice was identical with that first used on the occasion of Sir Job Charlton’s election to the Chair in the time of Charles II. The title of Speaker was bestowed because he alone had the right to speak to or address the King in the name and on behalf of the House of Commons. Of this privilege he customarily availed himself at considerable length. On being summoned to the presence of the Sovereign in the House of Lords he, in servile terms, begged to be excused from undertaking the duties of Speaker, ‘which,’ he protested, ‘require greater abilities than I can pretend to own.’ The Lord Chancellor, by direction of the Sovereign, assured the modest man that ‘having very attentively heard your discreet and handsome discourse,’ the King would not consent to refusal of the Chair. Thereupon the Speaker-designate launched forth into a fresh, even more ornate, address, claiming ‘renewal of the ancient privileges of Your most loyal and dutiful House of Commons.’ Whereto His Majesty, speaking again by the mouth of the Lord Chancellor, remarked, not without a sense of humour, that ‘he hath heard and well weighed your short and eloquent oration and in the first place much approves that you have introduced a shorter way of speaking on these occasions.’

Up to 1883 the Speaker’s salary was, as it is to-day, £5000 a year. In addition to his salary he received fees amounting to £2000 or £3000 per session. On his election he was presented with 2000 ounces of plate, £1000 of equipment money, two hogsheads of claret, £100 per annum for stationery, and a stately residence in convenient contiguity to the House. These little extras made the post worth at least £8000 per annum.

In the present and recent Parliament an ancient tradition is kept up by a member for the City of London seating himself on the Treasury Bench. Two members are privileged to take their places there, but after his election for the City Mr. Arthur Balfour left Sir Frederick Banbury in sole possession of the place. To-day, by the strange derangement of party ties consequent on the war, the ex-Prime Minister has permanently shifted his quarters to the Treasury Bench under the leadership of a Radical Premier. In the first third of the nineteenth century the City of London returned four members, who not only sat on the Treasury Bench on the opening day of the new Parliament, but arrayed themselves in scarlet gowns. Sir Frederick Banbury stopped short of acquiring that distinction.

During the first two sessions of the reformed Parliament the Commons met at noon for the purpose of presenting petitions and transacting other business of minor importance. These morning sittings, precursors of others instituted by Disraeli and since abandoned, usually lasted till three o’clock, the House then adjourning till five, when real business was entered upon. Subsequently this arrangement was abandoned, the Speaker taking the Chair at half-past three. Even then the first and freshest hour and a half of the sitting were spent in the presentation of petitions or in debate thereupon. The interval can be explained only upon the assumption that the petitions were read verbatim.

In the Parliamentary procedure of to-day petitions play a part of ever decreasing importance. Their presentation takes precedence of all other business. But the member in charge of one is not permitted to stray beyond briefest description of its prayer and a statement of the number of signatories. Thereupon, by direction of the Speaker, he thrusts the petition into a sack hanging to the left of the Speaker’s chair, and there an end on’t. There is, it is true, a Committee of Petitions which is supposed to examine every document. As far as practical purposes are concerned, petitions might as well be dropped over the Terrace into the Thames as into the mouth of the appointed sack.

At times of popular excitement round a vexed question—by preference connected with the Church, the sale of liquor, or, before her ghost was laid, marriage with the deceased wife’s sister—the flame systematically fanned is kept burning by the presentation of monster petitions. Amid ironical cheers these are carried in by two elderly messengers, who lay them at the foot of the Table. Having been formally presented, they are, amid renewed merriment, carried forth again and nothing more is heard of them, unless the Committee on Petitions reports that there is suspicious similarity in the handwriting of blocks of signatures, collected by an energetic person remunerated by commission upon the aggregate number.

The most remarkable demonstration made in modern times happened during the short life of the Parliament elected in 1892. Members coming down in time for prayers discovered to their amazement the floor of the House blocked with monster rolls, such as are seen in the street when the repair of underground telegraph wires is in progress. The member to whose personal care this trifle had been submitted rising to present the petition, Mr. Labouchere, on a point of order, objected that sight of him was blocked by the gigantic cylinders. ‘The hon. gentleman,’ he suggested, ‘should mount one and address the Chair from the eminence.’ The suggestion was disregarded, and in time the elderly messengers put their shoulders to wheels and rolled the monsters out of the House.

‘Q,’ whose eagle eye nothing escapes, comments on the preponderance of bald heads among Ministers. Occupying an idle moment, he counted the number of bald heads and found them to amount to one-third of the full muster. ‘Taking the whole 658,’ he writes in one of his simple but delightful asides, ‘I should think that perhaps a fourth part are more or less baldheaded. The number of red heads,’ he adds, ‘is also remarkable. I should think they are hardly less numerous than bald ones. When I come to advert to individual members of distinction it cannot fail to strike the reader how many are red-headed.’

This interesting inference is, if it be accepted as well-founded, damaging to the status of the present House of Commons. I do not, on reflection, recall a single member so decorated.

As to baldheadedness—which in the time of the prophet Elisha was regarded as an undesirable eccentricity, public notice of which, it will be remembered, condemned the commentators to severe disciplinary punishment—it was, curiously enough, a marked peculiarity among members of the House of Commons in an early decade of the nineteenth century. I have a prized engraving presenting a view of the interior of the House of Commons during the sessions of 1821-3. Glancing over the crowded benches, I observe that the proportion of baldheaded men is at least equal to that noted by ‘Q’ in the Parliament sitting a dozen years later.

What are known as scenes in the House were not infrequent in ‘Q’s’ time. He recalls one in which an otherwise undistinguished member for Oxford, one Hughes Hughes, was made the butt. It was a flash of the peculiar, not always explicable, humour of the House of Commons, still upon occasion predominant, to refuse a gentleman a hearing. ‘Hughes’s rising was the signal for continuous uproar,’ ‘Q’ writes. ‘At repeated intervals a sort of drone-like drumming, having the sound of a distant hand organ or bagpipes, arose from the back benches. Coughing, sneezing and ingeniously extended yawning blended with other sounds. A voice from the Ministerial benches imitated very accurately the yelp of a kennelled hound.’

For ten minutes the double-barrelled Hughes faced the music, and when he sat down not a word save the initial ‘Sir’ had been heard from his lips.

The nearest approach to this scene I remember happened in the last session of the Parliament of 1868-74, when, amidst similar uproar, Cavendish Bentinck, as one describing at the time the uproar wrote, ‘went out behind the Speaker’s Chair and crowed thrice.’ This was the occasion upon which Sir Charles Dilke made his Parliamentary début. In Committee of Ways and Means he, in uncompromising fashion that grated on the ears of loyalists, called attention to the Civil List of Queen Victoria and moved a reduction. Auberon Herbert, now a staid Tory, at that time suspected of a tendency towards Republicanism, undertook to second the amendment. Sir Charles managed amid angry interruptions to work off his speech. Herbert, following him, was met by a storm of resentment that made his sentences inaudible.

After uproar had prevailed for a full quarter of an hour a shamefaced member, anxious for the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments, called attention to the presence of strangers. Forthwith, in accordance with the regulation then in force, the galleries were cleared. As the occupants of the Press Gallery reluctantly departed, they heard above the shouting the sound of cock-crowing. Looking over the baluster they saw behind the Chair Little Ben, as Cavendish Bentinck was called to distinguish him from his bigger kinsman, vigorously engaged upon a vain effort to preserve order by a passable imitation of Chanticleer saluting the happy morn.

From ‘Q’s’ report of another outbreak of disorder it would appear that in the House meeting in the ‘thirties of the nineteenth century, exchange of personalities went far beyond modern experience. The once heated Maynooth question was to the fore. In the course of an animated set-to between a Mr. Shaw and Daniel O’Connell, the former shouted ‘The Hon. Member has charged me with being actuated by spiritual ferocity. My ferocity is not of the description which takes for its symbol a death’s head and cross bones.’ O’Connell, as a certain fishwife locally famous for picturesque language discovered, was hard to beat in the game of vituperation. Turning upon Shaw, he retorted ‘Yours is a calf’s head and jaw bones.’

‘Q’ records that the retort was greeted with deafening cheers from the Ministerial side where O’Connell and his party were seated. Mr. Shaw’s polite, but perhaps inconsequential, remark had been received with equal enthusiasm by the Opposition.

_AFTER THE BATTLE._

BY BENNET COPPLESTONE.

‘Caesar,’ said a Sub-lieutenant to his friend, a temporary Lieutenant R.N.V.R., who at the outbreak of war had been a classical scholar at Oxford, ‘you were in the thick of our scrap yonder off the Jutland coast. You were in it every blessed minute with the battle cruisers, and must have had a lovely time. Did you ever, Caesar, try to write the story of it?’

It was early in June of last year, and a group of officers had gathered near the ninth hole of an abominable golf course which they had themselves laid out upon an island in the great landlocked bay wherein reposed from their labours long lines of silent ships. It was a peaceful scene. Few even of the battleships showed the scars of battle, though among them were some which the Germans claimed to be at the bottom of the sea. There they lay, coaled, their magazines refilled, ready at short notice to issue forth with every eager man and boy standing at his action station. And while all waited for the next call, officers went ashore, keen, after the restrictions upon free exercise, to stretch their muscles upon the infamous golf course. It was, I suppose, one of the very worst courses in the world. There were no prepared tees, no fairway, no greens. But there was much bare rock, great tufts of coarse grass greedy of balls, wide stretches of hard, naked soil destructive of wooden clubs, and holes cut here and there of approximately the regulation size. Few officers of the Grand Fleet, except those in Beatty’s Salt of the Earth squadrons, far to the south, had since the war began been privileged to play upon more gracious courses. But the Sea Service, which takes the rough with the smooth, with cheerful and profane philosophy, accepted the home-made links as a spirited triumph of the handy-man over forbidding nature.

‘Yes,’ said the naval volunteer, ‘I tried many times, but gave up all attempts as hopeless. I came up here to get first-hand material, and have sacrificed my short battle leave to no purpose. The more I learn the more helplessly incapable I feel. I can describe the life of a ship, and make you people move and speak like live things. But a battle is too big for me. One might as well try to realise and set on paper the Day of Judgment. All I did was to write a letter to an old friend, one Copplestone, beseeching him to make clear to the people at home what we really had done. I wrote it three days after the battle, but never sent it. Here it is.’

Lieutenant Caesar drew a paper from his pocket and read as follows:

‘MY DEAR COPPLESTONE,—Picture to yourself our feelings. On
Wednesday we were in the fiery hell of the greatest naval
action ever fought. A real Battle of the Giants. Beatty’s and
Hood’s battle cruisers—chaffingly known as the Salt of the
Earth—and Evan Thomas’s squadron of four fast Queen Elizabeths
had fought for two hours the whole German High Seas Fleet.
Beatty, in spite of his heavy losses, had outmanœuvred Fritz’s
battle cruisers and enveloped the German line. The Fifth Battle
Squadron had stalled off the German Main Fleet, and led them
into the net of Jellicoe, who, coming up, deployed between Evan
Thomas and Beatty, though he could not see either, crossed the
T of the Germans in the beautifullest of beautiful manœuvres,
and had them for a moment as good as sunk. But the Lord giveth
and the Lord taketh away; it is sometimes difficult to say
Blessed be the Name of the Lord. For just when we most needed
full visibility the mist came down thick, the light failed, and
we were robbed of the fruits of victory when they were almost
in our hands. It was hard, hard, bitterly hard. But we had
done the utmost which the Fates permitted. The enemy, after
being harried all night by destroyers, had got away home in
torn rags, and we were left in supreme command of the North
Sea, a command more complete and unchallengeable than at any
moment since the war began. For Fritz had put out his full
strength, all his unknown cards were on the table, we knew
his strength and his weakness, and that he could not stand
for a moment against our concentrated power. All this we had
done, and rejoiced mightily. In the morning we picked up from
Poldhu the German wireless claiming the battle as a glorious
victory—at which we laughed loudly. But there was no laughter
when in the afternoon Poldhu sent out an official message from
our own Admiralty which, from its clumsy wording and apologetic
tone, seemed actually to suggest that we had had the devil of a
hiding. Then when we arrived at our bases came the newspapers
with their talk of immense losses, and of bungling, and of
the Grand Fleet’s failure! Oh, it was a monstrous shame! The
country which depends utterly upon us for life and honour, and
had trusted us utterly, had been struck to the heart. We had
come back glowing, exalted by the battle, full of admiration
for the skill of our leaders and for the serene intrepidity
of our men. We had seen our ships go down and pay the price
of sea command—pay it willingly and ungrudgingly as the Navy
always pays. Nothing that the enemy had done or could do was
able to hurt us, but we had been mortally wounded in the house
of our friends. It will take days, weeks, perhaps months, for
England and the world to be made to understand and to do us
justice. Do what you can, old man. Don’t delay a minute. Get
busy. You know the Navy, and love it with your whole soul.
Collect notes and diagrams from the scores of friends whom
you have in the Service; they will talk to you and tell you
everything. I can do little myself. A Naval Volunteer who
fought through the action in a turret, looking after a pair
of big guns, could not himself see anything outside his thick
steel walls. Go ahead at once, do knots, and the fighting Navy
will remember you in its prayers.’

The attention of others in the group had been drawn to the reader and his letter, and when Lieutenant Caesar stopped, flushed and out of breath, there came a chorus of approving laughter.

‘This temporary gentleman is quite a literary character,’ said a two-ring Lieutenant who had been in an exposed spotting top throughout the whole action, ‘but we’ve made a Navy man of him since he joined. That’s a dashed good letter, and I hope you sent it.’

‘No,’ said Caesar. ‘While I was hesitating, wondering whether I would risk the lightning of the Higher Powers, a possible court martial, and the loss of my insecure wavy rings, the business was taken out of my hands by this same man to whom I was wanting to write. He got moving on his own account, and now, though the battle is only ten days old, the country knows the rights of what we did. When it comes to describing the battle itself, I make way for my betters. For what could I see? On the afternoon of May 31, we were doing gun drill in my turret. Suddenly came an order to put lyddite into the guns and follow the Control. During the next two hours as the battle developed we saw nothing. We were just parts of a big human machine intent upon working our own little bit with faultless accuracy. There was no leisure to think of anything but the job in hand. From beginning to end I had no suggestion of a thrill, for a naval action in a turret is just gun drill glorified, as I suppose it is meant to be. The enemy is not seen; even the explosions of the guns are scarcely heard. I never took my ear-protectors from their case in my pocket. All is quiet, organised labour, sometimes very hard labour when for any reason one has to hoist the great shells by the hand purchase. It is extraordinary to think that I got fifty times more actual excitement out of a squadron regatta months ago than out of the greatest battle in naval history.’

‘That’s quite true,’ said the Spotting Officer, ‘and quite to be expected. Battleship fighting is not thrilling except for the very few. For nine-tenths of the officers and men it is a quiet, almost dull routine of exact duties. For some of us up in exposed positions in the spotting tops or on the signal bridge, with big shells banging on the armour or bursting alongside in the sea, it becomes mighty wetting and very prayerful. For the still fewer, the real fighters of the ship in the conning tower, it must be absorbingly interesting. But for the true blazing rapture of battle one has to go to the destroyers. In a battleship one lives like a gentleman until one is dead, and takes the deuce of a lot of killing. In a destroyer one lives rather like a pig, and one dies with extraordinary suddenness. Yet the destroyer officers and men have their reward in a battle, for then they drink deep of the wine of life. I would sooner any day take the risks of destroyer work, tremendous though they are, just for the fun which one gets out of it. It was great to see our boys round up Fritz’s little lot. While you were in your turret, and the Sub. yonder in control of a side battery, Fritz massed his destroyers like Prussian infantry and tried to rush up close so as to strafe us with the torpedo. Before they could get fairly going, our destroyers dashed at them, broke up their masses, buffeted and hustled them about exactly like a pack of wolves worrying sheep, and with exactly the same result. Fritz’s destroyers either clustered together like sheep or scattered flying to the four winds. It was just the same with the light cruisers as with the destroyers. Fritz could not stand against us for a moment, and could not get away, for we had the heels of him and the guns of him. There was a deadly slaughter of destroyers and light cruisers going on while we were firing our heavy stuff over their heads. Even if we had sunk no battle cruisers or battleships, the German High Seas Fleet would have been crippled for months by the destruction of its indispensable “cavalry screen.”’

As the Spotting Officer spoke, a Lieutenant-Commander holed out on the last jungle with a mashie—no one uses a putter on the Grand Fleet’s private golf course—and approached our group, who, while they talked, were busy over a picnic lunch.

‘If you pigs haven’t finished all the bully beef and hard tack,’ said he, ‘perhaps you can spare a bite for one of the blooming ’eroes of the X Destroyer Flotilla.’ The speaker was about twenty-seven, in rude health, and bore no sign of the nerve-racking strain through which he had passed for eighteen long-drawn hours. The young Navy is as unconscious of nerves as it is of indigestion. The Lieutenant-Commander, his hunger satisfied, lighted a pipe and joined in the talk.

‘It was hot work,’ said he, ‘but great sport. We went in sixteen and came out a round dozen. If Fritz had known his business, I ought to be dead. He can shoot very well till he hears the shells screaming past his ears, and then his nerves go. Funny thing how wrong we’ve been about him. He is smart to look at, fights well in a crowd, but cracks when he has to act on his own without orders. When we charged his destroyers and ran right in he just crumpled to bits. We had a batch of him nicely herded up, and were laying him out in detail with guns and mouldies, when there came along a beastly intrusive Control Officer on a battle cruiser and took him out of our mouths. It was a sweet shot, though. Someone—I don’t know his name, or he would hear of his deuced interference from me—plumped a salvo of twelve-inch common shell right into the brown of Fritz’s huddled batch. Two or three of his destroyers went aloft in scrap-iron, and half a dozen others were disabled. After the first hour his destroyers and light cruisers ceased to be on the stage; they had flown quadrivious—there’s an ormolu word for our classical volunteer—and we could have a whack at the big ships. Later, at night, it was fine. We ran right in upon Fritz’s after-guard of sound battleships and rattled them most tremendous. He let fly at us with every bally gun he had, from four-inch to fourteen, and we were a very pretty mark under his searchlights. We ought to have been all laid out, but our loss was astonishingly small, and we strafed two of his heavy ships. Most of his shots went over us.’

‘Yes,’ called out the Spotting Officer, ‘yes, they did, and ricochetted all round us in the Queen Elizabeths. There was the devil of a row. The firing in the main action was nothing to it. All the while you were charging, and our guns were masked for fear of hitting you, Fritz’s bonbons were screaming over our upper works and making us say our prayers out loud in the Spotting Tops. You’d have thought we were at church. I was in the devil of a funk, and could hear my teeth rattling. It is when one is fired on and can’t hit back that one thinks of one’s latter end.’

‘Did any of you see the _Queen Mary_ go?’ asked a tall thin man with the three rings of a Commander. ‘Our little lot saw nothing of the first part of the battle; we were with the K.G. Fives and Orions.’

‘I saw her,’ spoke a Gunnery Lieutenant, a small, quiet man with dreamy, introspective eyes—the eyes of a poet turned gunner. ‘I saw her. She was hit forward, and went in five seconds. You all know how. It was a thing which won’t bear talking about. The _Invincible_ took a long time to sink, and was still floating bottom up when Jellicoe’s little lot came in to feed after we and the Salt of the Earth had eaten up most of the dinner. I don’t believe that half the Grand Fleet fired a shot.’

There came a savage growl from officers of the main Battle Squadrons, who, invited to a choice banquet, had seen it all cleared away before their arrival. ‘That’s all very well,’ grumbled one of them; ‘the four Q.E.s are getting a bit above themselves because they had the luck of the fair. They didn’t fight the High Seas Fleet by their haughty selves because they wanted to, you bet.’

The Gunnery Lieutenant with the dreamy eyes smiled. ‘We certainly shouldn’t have chosen that day to fight them on. But if the _Queen Elizabeth_ herself had been with us, and we had had full visibility—with the horizon a hard dark line—we would have willingly taken on all Fritz’s twelve-inch Dreadnoughts and thrown in his battle cruisers.’

‘That’s the worst of it,’ grumbled the Commander, very sore still at having tasted only of the skim milk of the battle; ‘naval war is now only a matter of machines. The men don’t count as they did in Nelson’s day.’

‘Excuse me, sir,’ remarked the Sub-Lieutenant; ‘may I say a word or two about that? I have been thinking it out.’

There came a general laugh. The Sub-Lieutenant, twenty years of age, small and dark and with the bright black eyes of his mother—a pretty little lady from the Midi de la France whom his father had met and married in Paris—did not look like a philosopher, but he had the clear-thinking, logical mind of his mother’s people.

‘Think aloud, my son,’ said the Commander. ‘As a living incarnation of l’Entente Cordiale, you are privileged above those others of the gun-room.’

The light in the Sub’s eyes seemed to die out as his gaze turned inwards. He spoke slowly, carefully, sometimes injecting a word from his mother’s tongue which could better express his meaning. He looked all the while towards the sea, and seemed scarcely to be conscious of an audience of seniors. His last few sentences were spoken wholly in French.

‘No—naval war is a war of men, as it always was and always will be. For what are the machines but the material expression of the souls of the men? Our ships are better and faster than the German ships, our guns heavier and more accurate than theirs, our gunners more deadly than their gunners, because our Navy has the greater human soul. The Royal Navy is not a collection of lifeless ships and guns imposed upon men by some external power as the Kaiser sought to impose a fleet upon the Germans, a nation of landsmen. The Navy is only a matter of machines in so far as human beings can only achieve material ends by material means. I look upon the ships and guns as secreted by the men just as a tortoise secretes its shell. They are the products of naval thought, and naval brains, and, above all, of that ever-expanding naval soul (_l’esprit_) which has been growing for a thousand years. Our ships yonder are materially new, the products almost of yesterday, but really they are old, centuries old; they are the expression of a naval soul working, fermenting, always growing through the centuries, always seeking to express itself in machinery. Naval war is an art, the art of men, and where in the world will one find men like ours, officers like ours? Have you ever thought whence come those qualities which one sees glowing every day in our men, from the highest Admiral to the smallest ship boy—have you ever thought whence they come?’

He paused, still looking out to sea. His companions, all of them his superiors in rank and experience, stared at him in astonishment, and one or two laughed. But the Commander signalled for silence. ‘Et après,’ he asked quietly; ‘d’où viennent ces qualités?’ Unconsciously he had sloughed the current naval slang and spoke in the native language of the Sub.

The effect was not what he had expected. At the sound of the Commander’s voice speaking in French the Sub-Lieutenant woke up, flushed, and instantly reverted to his English self. ‘I am sorry, sir. I got speaking French, in which I always think, and when I talk French I talk the most frightful rot.’

‘I am not so sure that it was rot. Your theory seems to be that we are, in the naval sense, the heirs of the ages, and that no nation that has not been through our centuries-old mill can hope to stand against us. I hope that you are right. It is a comforting theory.’

‘But isn’t that what we all think, sir, though we may not put it quite that way? Most of us know that our officers and men are of unapproachable stuff in body and mind, but we don’t seek for a reason. We accept it as an axiom. I’ve tried to reason the thing out because I’m half French; and also because I’ve been brought up among dogs and horses and believe thoroughly in heredity. It’s all a matter of breeding.’

‘The Sub’s right,’ broke in the Gunnery Lieutenant with the poet’s eyes; ‘though a Sub who six months ago was a snotty has no business to think of anything outside his duty. The Service would go to the devil if the gun-room began to talk psychology. We excuse it in this Sub here for the sake of the Entente Cordiale, of which he is the living embodiment; but had any other jawed at us in that style I would have sat upon his head. Of course he is right, though it isn’t our English way to see through things and define them as the French do. No race on earth can touch us for horses or dogs or prize cattle—or Navy men. It takes centuries to breed the boys who ran submarines through the Dardanelles and the Sound and stayed out in narrow enemy waters for weeks together. Brains and nerves and sea skill can’t be made to order even by a German Kaiser. Navy men should marry young and choose their women from sea families, and then their kids won’t need to be taught. They’ll have the secret of the Service in their blood.’

‘That’s all very fine,’ observed a Marine Lieutenant reflectively; ‘but who is going to pay for it all? We can’t. I get 7_s._ 6_d._ a day, and shall have 11_s._ in a year or two; it sounds handsome, but would hardly run to a family. Few in the Navy have any private money, so how can we marry early?’

‘Of course we can’t as things go now,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant. ‘But some day even the Admiralty will discover that the English Navy will become a mere list of useless machines unless the English naval families can be kept up on the lower deck as well as in the ward-room and gun-room. Why, look at the names of our submarine officers whenever they get into the papers for honours. They are always salt of the sea, names which have been in the Navy List ever since there was a List. You may read the same names in the Trafalgar roll and back to the Dutch wars. Most of us were Pongos before that—shore Pongos who went afloat with Blake or Prince Rupert—but then we became sailors, and so remained, father to son. I can only go back myself to the Glorious First of June, but some of us here in the Grand Fleet date from the Stuarts at least. It is jolly fine to be of Navy blood, but not all plum jam. One has such a devil of a record to live up to. In my term at Dartmouth there was a poor little beast called Francis Drake—a real Devon Drake, a genuine antique—but what a load of a name to carry! Thank God, my humble name doesn’t shine out of the history books. And as with the officers, so with the seamen. Half of them come from my own county of Devon—the cradle of the Navy. They are in the direct line from Drake’s buccaneers. Most of the others come from the ancient maritime counties of the Channel seaboard, where the blood of everyone tingles with Navy salt. The Germans can build ships which are more or less accurate copies of our own, but they can’t breed the men. That is the whole secret.’

The Lieutenant-Commander, whose war-scarred destroyer lay below refitting, laughed gently. ‘There is a lot in all that, more than we often realise when we grumble at the cursed obstinacy of our old ratings, but even you do not go back far enough. It is the old blood of the Vikings and sea-pirates in us English which makes us turn to the sea; the rest is training. In no other way can you explain the success of the Fringes, the mine-sweepers, and patrols, most of them manned by naval volunteers who, before the war, had never served under the White Ensign nor seen a shot fired. What is our classical scholar here, Caesar, but a naval volunteer whom Whale Island and natural intelligence have turned into a gunner? But as regards the regular Navy, the Navy of the Grand Fleet, you are right. Pick your boys from the sea families, catch them young, pump them full to the teeth with the Navy Spirit—_l’esprit marine_ of our bi-lingual Sub here—make them drunk with it. Then they are all right. But they must never be allowed to think of a darned thing except of the job in hand. The Navy has no use for men who seek to peer into their own souls. They might do it in action and discover blue funk. We want them to be no more conscious of their souls than of their livers. Though I admit that it is devilish difficult to forget one’s liver when one has been cooped up in a destroyer for a week. It is not nerve that Fritz lacks so much as a kindly obedient liver. He is an iron-gutted swine, and that is partly why he can’t run destroyers and submarines against us. The German liver is a thing to wonder at. Do you know—’ but here the Lieutenant-Commander became too Rabelaisian for my delicate pen.

The group had thinned out during this exercise in naval analysis. Several of the officers had resumed their heart-and-club-breaking struggle with the villainous golf course, but the Sub, the volunteer Lieutenant, and the Pongo (Marine) still sat at the feet of their seniors. ‘May I say how the Navy strikes an outsider like me?’ asked Caesar diffidently. Whale Island, which had forgotten all other Latin authors, had given him the name as appropriate to one of his learning.

‘Go ahead,’ said the Commander generously. ‘All this stuff is useful enough for a volunteer; without the Pongos and the Volunteers to swallow our tall stories, the Navy would fail of an audience. The snotties know too much.’

‘I was going to speak of the snotties,’ said Caesar, ‘who seem to me to be even more typical of the Service than the senior officers. They have all its qualities emphasised, almost comically exaggerated. I do not know whether they are never young or that they never grow old, but there is no essential difference in age and in knowledge between a snotty six months out of cadet training and a Commander of six years’ standing. They rag after dinner with equal zest, and seem to be equally well versed in the profound technical details of their sea work. Perhaps it is that they are born full of knowledge. The snotties interest me beyond every type that I have met. Their manners are perfect and in startling contrast with those of the average public school boy of fifteen or sixteen—even in College at Winchester—and they combine their real irresponsible youthfulness with a grave mask of professional learning which is delightful to look upon. I have before me the vision of a child of fifteen with tousled yellow hair and a face as glum as a sea-boot, sitting opposite to me in the machine which took us back one day to the boat, smoking a “fag” with the clumsiness which betrayed his lack of practice, in between bites of “goo” (in this instance Turkish Delight), of which I had seen him consume a pound. He looked about ten years old, and in a husky, congested voice, due to the continual absorption of sticky food, he described minutely to me the method of conning a battleship in manœuvres and the correct amount to allow for the inertia of the ship when the helm is centred; he also explained the tactical handling of a squadron during sub-calibre firing. That snotty was a sheer joy, and the Navy is full of him. He’s gone himself, poor little chap—blown to bits by a shell which penetrated the deck.’

‘In time, Caesar,’ said the Commander, ‘by strict attention to duty you will become a Navy man. But we have talked enough of deep mysteries. It was that confounded Sub, with his French imagination, who started us. What I really wish someone would tell me is this: what was the “northern enterprise” that Fritz was on when we chipped in and spoilt his little game?’

‘It does not matter,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant. ‘We spoilt it, anyhow. The dear old newspapers talk of his losses in big ships as if they were all that counted. What has really crippled him has been the wiping out of his destroyers and fast new cruisers. Without them he is helpless. It was a great battle, much more decisive than most people think, even in the Grand Fleet itself. It was as decisive by sea as the Marne was by land. We have destroyed Fritz’s mobility.’

The men rose and looked out over the bay. There below them lay their sea homes, serene, invulnerable, and about them stretched the dull, dour, treeless landscape of their northern fastness. Their minds were as peaceful as the scene. As they looked a bright light from the compass platform of one of the battleships began to flicker through the sunshine—dash, dot, dot, dash. ‘There goes a signal,’ said the Commander. ‘You are great at Morse, Pongo. Read what it says, my son.’

The Lieutenant of Marines watched the flashes, and as he read grinned capaciously. ‘It is some wag with a signal lantern.’ said he. ‘It reads: Question—Daddy,—what—did—you—do—in—the—Great—War?’

‘I wonder,’ observed the Sub-Lieutenant, ‘what new answer the lower deck has found to that question. Before the battle their reply was: “I was kept doubling round the decks, sonny.”’

‘There goes the signal again,’ said the Pongo; ‘and here comes the answer.’ He read it out slowly as it flashed word after word: ‘“I LAID THE GUNS TRUE, SONNY.”’

‘And a dashed good answer, too,’ cried the Commander heartily.

‘That would make a grand fleet signal before a general action,’ remarked the Gunnery Lieutenant. ‘I don’t care much for Nelson’s Trafalgar signal. It was too high-flown and sentimental for the lower deck. It was aimed at the history books, rather than at old tarry-breeks of the fleet a hundred years ago. No—there could not be a better signal than just “Lay the Guns True”—carry out your orders precisely, intelligently, faultlessly. What do you say, my Hun of a classical volunteer?’

‘It could not be bettered,’ said Caesar.

‘I will make a note of it,’ said the Gunnery Lieutenant, ‘against the day when, as a future Jellicoe, I myself shall lead a new Grand Fleet into action.’

_L’ILE NANCE._

BY ROWLAND CRAGG.

Nance was a tomboy, or whatever may be the equivalent of this type in the doggy world, and she looked it. An ungainly body, clad in a rough coat of silver and grey on a foundation of brown, carried a head that appeared ill-shaped because of the unusual width of skull. Over her forehead continually straggled a tangle of hairs that mixed with others growing stiffly above her snout, and through this cover were to be seen two pearly eyes that were wondrously bright and intelligent. She had a trick, too, of tossing her head in a manner suggestive of nothing so much as a girl throwing back the curls from face and shoulders, and it seemed to emphasise the tomboy in Nance. But she had sterling qualities, of which her broad skull and quick eyes gave more than a hint. If ungainly, her little body was untiring and as supple as a whiplash, and her legs were as finely tempered steel springs. She had, too, a rare turn of speed, and it was the combination of these gifts with her remarkable intelligence that in later days made her the most noted dog in Craven.

Her puppyhood was unpromising. Indeed, for one born on a farm, where is lack neither of shelter nor food, her earliest hours were doubly perilous, for, in addition to the prospect of a watery grave in a bucket, her existence, and that of the whole litter, was threatened by negligent nursing. Fate had given the little family a mother not only herself young, but of all dogs that ever worked on a farm the most irresponsible. It was quite in keeping with her reputation that Lucy should bring her children to birth in the exposed hollow trunk of a tree and then forget the blind, sprawling, whimpering puppies for hours together. It was going hard with the weaklings when fate again took a hand in their welfare, this time in the person of young Zub.

It had become evident to the farm folk, to whom matters of birth and reproduction are commonplaces of daily life, that Lucy’s new duties had come upon her, and it was plainly evident, too, before the third day had run, that she was neglecting them. It was then that young Zub, or Zubdil, as he was indifferently called, either name serving to distinguish him from Owd Zub, his father, actively bestirred himself. Hitherto he had done no more than keep his eyes and ears open as he moved about the farm buildings, but neither soft whimper nor the sound of tender noses nuzzling against a warm body had rewarded him. His first deliberate efforts were to watch Lucy’s comings and goings, in the hope of tracing her hiding-place. But the mother dog, a poacher at heart and with all a four-footed poacher’s cunning, had easily beaten him at this game. When he recognised this, angry at the thought that somewhere a small family was suffering, he soundly cuffed her about the ears in the hope that she would bolt for her hiding-place and her blind charges. But the graceless one, howling, raced no further than to her kennel, and from its depths kept one watchful eye open for further developments.

‘Drat thee,’ cried Zubdil, as his experiment went wrong, ‘but I’ll find ’em yet.’ He turned and slowly entered the kitchen, where Owd Zub was quietly chuckling to himself.

‘Shoo’s bested thee, reight an’ all, this time,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t thy books tell thee owt?’

It was a thrust he was fond of making. Zubdil’s strongly developed taste for reading was something beyond the old farmer’s understanding. He would have given but occasional heed to it had not the younger man taken up works on scientific farming and breeding, and also studied these subjects in a course of postal lessons with the Agricultural Department at the Northern University. New ideas thus acquired often clashed with the father’s ingrained conservative methods, and they left him sore. A chance to get in a sly dig at this ‘book larning’ was too good to be missed. He chuckled again as he asked the question.

The younger man laughed. He was broadening in more ways than one, and he bore no malice. ‘Happen they do,’ he said. ‘Yo just watch, fayther, an’ happen yo’ll leearn summat.’

He reached up to the blackened oak beam that spanned the ceiling, took down his gun, and strolled casually out across the yard. In a moment Lucy had tumultuously burst out of the kennel and was dancing about him, all animation and keenness. Graceless she might be, and lacking in the discharge of her mothering duties, but heart and soul she was a lover of sport. At the sight of the gun she was in transports. Unheeding her, young Zub passed on through the gate. Wriggling through ere it closed, Lucy was after him and away in front of him like a streak, making river-wards. There, as well she knew, were the plumpest rabbits. When the old dalesman, his curiosity whetted, reached a point where he could see without being seen, the two were ranging the low field where runs the Wharfe. Steadily they passed along through Dub End and into Lang Pasture, the gun still hooked in the curl of the man’s arm, then as they came through the field gate together into the High Garth Lucy’s tail suddenly drooped. She hesitated, turned about in indecision, and finally, disregarding the sharp whistle calling her to heel, slid off up the hill under the wall-side and vanished by the riven oak.

‘Dang it,’ said Owd Zub, greatly interested, and understanding, ‘I owt to ha’ knawn shoo’d ha’ gooan to ’em if they came owt near ’em.’

By the time he arrived on the spot, and he walked across the field with a great show of carelessness, Zubdil had the whimpering youngsters on the grass and was examining them. Couched near by, her tail going in great pride, Lucy was mothering each one as it was laid down again.

‘They’re a poor lot,’ said the elder man, eyeing them critically, and discreetly making no reference to the finding of them; ‘put ’em ivvery one i’ t’ pail.’

Zubdil did not reply immediately. He was watching one puppy, more vigorous than any of the rest, trying to prop itself up on its forelegs. Its sightless eyes were turned towards him, its tiny nostrils were working, and there was a decided quiver—it was an immature wagging—in its wisp of a tail. He picked it up again. A tiny patch of red slid out and licked his hand, and there were faint noises that brought Lucy’s ears to the prick. Zubdil laughed.

‘Sitha for pluck, fayther,’ he cried. ‘This is best o’ t’ lot. I’se keeping this for mysen.’

‘Thou’ll drown t’ lot,’ said his father, sharply. ‘We’ve dogs enough on t’ farm. Besides, they’re hawf deead.’

They are sparing of speech, these Craven dalesmen, but their words are ever to the point. They have also a stiff measure of obstinacy in their constitution, as have all men whose forebears for generations have lived and died amid the everlasting hills. Obstinacy now showed in the younger man. He put the youngster down beside the mother dog, gathered up the others into a bag that he took from his capacious pocket, and rose. Lucy was up in an instant, ears cocked. Zubdil checked her sternly.

‘Lig thee theer,’ he ordered, and she resumed her nursing under constraint. Young Zub turned to the elder.

‘I’se keeping it,’ he announced, briefly.

The other knew that tone, and gave in. ‘Well,’ grudgingly, ‘I’se heving nowt to do wi’ it, then. An’ if theer’s another licence to get, tha pays for it thysen.’

So the pup was spared, and she flourished and grew apace. Nance, he called her, after one from a neighbouring farm, thoughts of whom had been occupying his mind a good deal of late. He ventured to tell her what he had done when one evening, by chance that had been occurring frequently of late, he met her by the old bridge. The girl reddened with pleasure at the implied compliment, giggled a little, and gave him a playful nudge with her elbow. It was a nudge that would have upset many a city-bred man. ‘Thou’s a silly fond fellow,’ she said, but there was no reproach in her words. Rather was it that in turn he was pleased. It was a little incident that marked a distinct advance in their relations.