H 
LAND & WATER 
April 12, 191 7 
hie and (coming trom the Midlunds) nobody at homo 
who could rig him put proper, he came to iiea without 
a proper kit. Any^vay, it didn't matter — we were only 
going across the Channel ! We came to the Mediter- 
ranean and after five months or so, our young fifth got 
-ick and was sent to hospital, where they dug out his 
ippendix and sent him out again to be " invalided 
home." Here the authorities stepped in, and behig 
only an engineer in the merchant service, he, a solicitor's 
son, was put in the steerage. He had no money, no 
clothes, and by God, if it hadn't been for the good hearts 
of the engineers of that hospital ship, he'd have arrived 
in the country he had been serving naked and without 
the few shillings to pay his rail-fare, home. He had 
" come into his own " sure enough. He was " invalided 
homo " 
Official Recognition 
Sir Edward Carson " foreshadowed recognition of the 
services of Merchant Seamen." Well, how would it do 
to put that young engineering student on the same level 
as the parson and medical students who are " doing their 
bit ? " How would it do to put a man like me, thirty-hve 
years old, member of the Institution of Mechanical 
Engineers, ist class B. of Trade Certificate and ist class 
U.S.A. License, with practical experience of all classes 
of ships' machinery from tramps to mail boats, on about 
the level of the ordained minister and the M.D. ? How 
would it do to put my uncle, who has just completed 
over thirty years in command in one of the oldest liners 
running to the East, and who was ready to retire when 
war broke out, but who carried on— how would it do 
to give the authorities a hint to treat him more like an 
experienced officer and less like a " shell-back " or a 
low character ! These are only given as samples of Mr. 
Garvin's " shell-back." I offer these suggestions to 
Sir Edward Carson as a basis. 
Another point of piercing interest to " shell-backs " 
like myself and m\' esteemed commander and chief 
engineer, is the astounding figure we always cut in 
hction, with the sole exception, perhaps, of Joseph 
Conrad's line tales. Consider liow we stand ! As a 
matter of fact, we stand nowhere save in the •'Comic 
Cuts" characters of Jacob's and Kipling's stories and in 
the melodramatic tales of the cheaper magazines. The 
only skipper the magazine story writers have any use 
for is the man who lost his ticket years ago and now 
conuTiands a tramp owned by German Jews ! 
But the point 1 am burning to dri\c home can be 
best illustrated from the L.\nl) cS: Wati-r from which 
I have alrcadv (pioted. I hnd two short stories therein, 
one about a " Yotmg Anzac " at Winchester, and one 
about a lieutenant wlio was a real line chap. Now both 
these stories, though I dislike their tone myself, are 
admirable for one verv sufficient reason : They simply 
sweat knowledge and love of their subjects. There 
isn't the least doubt, for instance, that " Centurion " 
knows and idealises the young English officer. There 
is no doubt " Bartim;EUS " knows and admires the 
saintly naval oflii .r- nf his stories. There is no doubt 
about it at all. 
But mark the change <i^ >uuii .i> the scene changes to 
the Merchant Service ! Recall any stories you may 
ha\e read about cargo ships and mail boats. To judge 
by the fiction which apiiart'ntly n^eets the requirements 
of the British and American publics, the Merchant 
Service is officered and engineered by a lot of foul- 
mouthed lunatics— chief engineers, invariably Scotch, 
who rush round witli a spanner smashing firemen's heads, 
skippers shooting u]) the bridge, mates in the toils of 
adventuresses. . . . 
And yet the deck or engineer officer has to go through 
his probation, his fiery ordeals, just the same as the 
public school man ! try and conceive the long weary 
fight from the day a lad goes into the work to the day 
he takes charge for the first time. " Centurion " talks 
of " handling men," by men he means British Tommies. 
What sort of figure would his officer cut if he had to 
handle a cosmopohtan crowd of firemen, coal ]>assers 
and greasers in the tropics and no military discipline 
to fall back on. What would he do with a crowd of 
lorty yelling Chinks surging up the tunnel to beat up a 
poor silly junior engintier who, in a moment of exaspera- 
tion, had punched'one of them ? What would he do 
with a lot of Japanese firemen, knowing not a word of 
English, who raced away up out of the stokehold at 
the nioment of collision and left him with a whirling 
telegrajjJi and no steam ? How would he run his watch 
and keep full speed if his lot included two Jajw who 
wertj too small to open the wing-lire doors, an Arab from 
Perim who ate hashish, and an Armenian and a West 
Indian negro who were always trying to knife each other 
over a Greek woman ? Handling men ! I tell you, sir, 
the British officer has a gaudy time of it compared with 
us in the Merchant Service this day ! To have a w-hite 
crowd once more ; a crowd who could all speak English 
and do as they were told ! It would be like changing 
from' lion-taming to kicking the cat ! 
And we have ten thousand ships at sea ! 
The American Filibusters 
By Our Special. Correspondent 
" .4 liltle group of wilful men representing no opinion 
hill their own have rendered the great Government of the 
I'nitcd Stales helpless and eontcmptible." So wrote 
President Wilson of the dozen Senators who during the 
last hours of the life of Congress prevented, on March 
4th, a vole .upon the bill supporting his project for the 
" armed neutrality " of the United States. Certain 
members nf this group again opposed the President in 
the Senate, when the question of Declaration of War 
was under discussion. This article, written in 
Washington after the first incident, describes the 
personality of these " wilful men." 
SENATORS I.A FOLLETTE AND :5lU-\E 
both come from the Middle West ; and the 
Middle West has been more indilt'erent than any 
other j>art of the country towards the war. Mr. 
La Follette sitting for Wisconsin, Mr. Stone sitting for 
Missouri, alike represent constituencies where the Teutonic 
element is strong. Mr. La Follette — because to him 
politics is a means for the production of a domestic 
I'topia : Mr. Stone — .because to him politics is a 
profession and a means to ho end save place and in- 
fluence — are both quite careless of foreign affairs. And 
the secret of the indifference of the Middle West is pros- 
erous and individualistic isolation plus the influence 
of its huge Teutonic communities. 
Mr. Stone is one of the most picturesque if least edifying 
characters in the Senate. Tall, his spare figure clad in 
the traditional rusty frock-coat (jf the American politician, 
his lean, foxy features surmounted with the pohtician'> 
black sombrero, he belongs to a past age, the age of 
sonorously flatulent oratory, or bar-room and hotel 
lobby good-fellowship, and of pohtical intrigues con- 
cocted in hired bedrooms reeking with tobacco smoke 
and foul with tobacco juice. One can sec; him in such 
a milieu entertaining the walking delegates of the 
Prussian propaganda, entertaining them not as Germans 
but as constituents or the friends of constituents. For, 
it would be to attribute too much to Senator Stone's 
mentality to write him down as intellectually ])ro-German. 
Chairman of the F'oreign Relations Conunittce of the 
Senate by virtue of seniority of service, his CQUception 
of foreign policy is of the old-fashioned F"ourth of July 
oration type, of the " America-can-lick-creation-only- 
luckily-shc-only-wants-to-bc-let-alone " type. Pro- 
German hC' is in the very practical sense of not wanting 
to wound till! feelings of constituents, in the sense of 
being a peace-at-almost-any-price man. Pro-German 
he has shown himself in the sense of mouthing out vagiit; 
and vainglorious resentment against the high-handed- 
ness of the British licet and of utterly failing to grasi) 
