H 
LAND & WATER 
October ii, 1917 
and instruction?. I suppose lie sometimes slept (though 1 
never once saw him a*iecp) for he showed me his sleeping 
aibin forward, which I shared, and it did not escape me 
that the stove chinme\' was red with the rust of seawater 
to the height of about five feet— which opened my eyes to 
the luxurj' of his existence in the winter gales. At one 
time, early in the war, he conducted a series of brilliant 
tactical operations against a number T)f Medical Boards who 
shared a belief, amounting to an infatuation, that a man 
who, as the result of an accident in childhood, could not march 
a mile without falling out and suffered excruciating agonies 
at regular inter\-als of about a week, was " unfit for general 
service." They kni>w better now. 
Our approach to our immediate objective was the occasion 
of a spirited display by the Lieutenant of his gifts as a trapeze 
artist. We had run up a hoist of signals aswe ne^red the Hue 
of patrols, and the engines being put at half-speed, the Lieu- 
tenant took two signalling flags in his hands like a pair of 
Indian clubs and ju'rched himself upon the rail of the bridge. 
He twined his calves with simian-like flexibility round the 
uprights, his feet suddenly became prehensile as he anchored 
them to the middle rail, and with his lower limbs thus moored, 
he proceeded to hurl his body about in space. His aiTns 
described an arc of three-quarters of a circle with daz/.ling 
rapidity as he executed a series of alphabetic jerks in the 
medium of semaphore varied by almost imperceptible commas 
and full-stops. Then he paused to take breath. 
An ecstatic figure on the upper rail of the bridge of the 
other drifter answered with similar gesticulations, to which 
the Lieutenant feelingly articulated in reply. 
The interlocutory proceedings of these knock-about 
comedians concluded with an inquiry from the patrol boat, 
which had been on point-duty in mid-channel for fourteen 
days, as to the success of a wedding ashore, at which the 
Lieutenant of our drifter had assisted as best man. 
•' A.r. THE BEST MAN LOOKED LOVELY," signalled 
the Lieutenant, and we descended to the chart-room for a 
mid-day dinner. 
He apologised for the menu, which was simple enough. I 
discovered afterwards that he made it a point of honour to 
share the same rations as the crew. The table appointments 
were also exiguous, and there seemed a shortage of plates. 
" They're " gone We?^t,' sir," said the orderly with a faint 
smile. " That depth-charge did them in." 
I raised my eyebrows interrogatively. And the Lieutenant, 
by way of explanation told a tale. It cannot be told here, 
but there is a certain C'-boat which will never make a " land- 
fall " in (krman waters again. The Admiralty, wluch is 
hard to convince, paid the " blood- money " over to the 
Lieutenant a few weeks ago and the patrol shared it out, 
according to their ratings, like a herring catch. And there 
was a " bump supper " at the Naval Base. But the 
auxiliaries hide their light under a bushel, and the lady visitors 
at a fashionable watering-place are still wondering querulously 
why the sea is so lustrously wet— they say their bathing'- 
dresses won't dry and that they smell strangely of oil. 
So one more of the Thugs of the sea had been put out of 
the way, and her crew lie fathoms deep in the Channel awaiting 
the day when the sea gives up its dead. 
"Dirty devils, I call them, sir," said the Skipper 
quietly, smokmg his pipe with his hands thrust into "his 
pockets and a reef in his jumper as we did a dog-watch 
together. He was a large stalwart man, speaking the East 
Anglian dialect, in which an " a " frequently does duty for 
an " c " and a " w " for a " u " Apart from these phonetic 
peculiarities Ins speech was good King's English, and I 
noticed that he used none of that truculent pidgin- English 
which by a curious literary conventid'n so many longshoremen 
of letters put into the mouth of those who go down to the 
sea m ships, Your novelist, dealing in words, is so apt to 
mistake strong language for strength of mind. 
The Skipper paused and refilled his pipe, pursuing some 
obscure strain of thought. Then he found speech. 
'• Did you hear tell of the Belgian Prince, sir ? Ave every- 
body has. There's never a dog-watch kept in any ship afloat 
m which that story isn't told. I've heard as men tell it in 
every boarding-house in Liinehousc and 'Frisco and Sydney 
and Shanghai. It's gone round the Horn, and it's gone 
east of Suez. Why, there's sailormen as doan't know enough 
to read their own discharge-note as have got that story by 
heart like a ' chantey.' They'll never forget it till the'^Day 
of Judgment. I 'm tliinkins as sailor-men as are not vet born 
will be telling that tale round the galley-fire at night long 
after j-our an' mv watch is up. ..." 
He paused and gazed out over a '' Upper "sea. I noticed 
he had forgotten to light his pipe. " I knew a skipper as had 
once done the dirty at sea. No one knew the rights of it 
exactly, and the ' Old Man ' never lost his ' ticket,' but the 
story I heard tell was that he'd been ' spoken ' by a ship flying 
signals of distress, and instead of putting down'his helhim to 
stand by, he'd kept on his course and left her to sink with all 
hands. And from that day he never entered a ' pub ' 
parlour but all the skippers 'ud get up and lave their glass 
untouched and walk out. If they saw him making down 
street on their port bow they'd port their helium so as to give 
him a wide berth. Never a one as ever passed the time of day 
with him or said ' what 's yours ? ' And it grew so that not a 
sailor-man wpuld sign on if he knew as he was to sail with that 
skipper ; some of them 'ud dcsart at first port they made 
wi'out waiting to be paid off. They got the idea as he brought 
bad luck, like a Russian Finn. And if you once get a notion 
like that in a sailor-man's head, ye '11 never get it out. I've 
heard tell of that skipper hauling up to ' speak ' a ship, and 
when his hoist had told the name of his craft t'other ship 
wouldn't so much as dip her ens'n to wish him ' God speed.' 
And if ye 're an outcast at sea God help ye, for the sea's a 
lonesome place. It so preyed on the mind of him that he 
began to see ships flying signals of distress a-beckoning of him, 
ships as wasn't there — till one night he put her straight on a 
reef and then went over her bows. . . . You see, sir, 
sailor-men have got their share of original sin, I'm no saying 
they haven't, but there's one sin no sailor dare commit, for 
it's the sin against the Holy Ghost— and that's leaving other 
sailor-men to perish. The sea's shifty enough and tarrible 
enough and treacherous enough as 'tis without men 
being . . ." He did not finish the sentence. "Well 
sir, I'm hanging about tack and tack instead of trimming 
my yards for a straight run, but the course I'm steering is 
this : the outlawry of that skipper warn't nothing to the 
outlawTy as awaits the German when he once more weighs 
anchor and puts to sea." 
And he lit his pipe. It seemed to me that his hand shook 
slightly. 
The sun was sinking slowly in the west, his light lingering 
on the headlands, in the east the skv was a deep blue 
flushed with rose pink, but nearer the heart of the .sun 
these delicate tints gave place to fleeces of ochre, and these 
in turn to flames of molten gold. The next moment the sun 
seemed to cease breathing upon the sky, all the cplours 
swooned and went slowly out, and even the golden aureole 
changed to a dull vermilion. The rocks became silhouettes, 
the clouds turned black, and the shoals of rose-shadow on the 
surface of the sea sank out of sight and gave place to a purple 
bloom. As the sun disappeared below the horizon a lingering 
ray tinged the darkling clouds with silver surge. 
With the last expiration of the sun the wine-dark sea changed 
to a leaden hue, and one by one stars twinkled overhead— 
the crescent of the Corona Borealis to port, the Pleiades 
to starboard, and over the truck of our foremast the constella- 
tion of the Great Bear. The air grew very cold. A great 
silence encompassed us, broken only by the lapping of the 
water against the ship's sides. Round about us was a waste 
of waters stretching away into impenetrable darkness. All the 
friendly lights that guide the homing ships in time of peace were 
put out. More than once before this our drifter, smothered 
m a fog with no warning light or siren to guide her, and unable 
to take a cross-bearing, had found herself casting the lead in 
thirty-five fathoms right under the lee of a towering cliff with 
only just time to put her engines full speed astern. Nothing 
lightened our darkness except a great beacon \yhich, elusive 
as lightning, winked at intervals across the sea revealing 
for a second the dark silhouette of the motor launch as she 
drifted about a mile awaA-. Our isolation was as complete 
as that of a listening-post. We were out in the No Man's 
Land of tjie Sea. 
"The letter is " said the Lieutenant softly to one 
of the watch as he passed along the deck. It was our secret 
signal in the event of our bumping up against a destroyer 
seeking to speak with her adversary in the gate. If our 
watch forgot it our number would be up. \^'e showed no 
lights, but hooded lamps, making faint patches of radiance 
on the deck, were stowed away under our bulwarks. 
Our station was. one of the favourite beats of the German 
submarines and we lay there waiting for the deadly sower 
of tares, waiting for her as for a thief in the night. From 
time to time pale .shafts of Hght terminating in an arc of 
phosphorescent cloud crept across the sky searching for 
the secret menace of the air as we were searching for the 
lurking terror of the sea. Now and again wraith-iike ships 
with all lights out stole across the field of our vision and 
sometimes our ears caught the pulsation of the engines of a 
slup we could not see. 
Time itself seemed to stand still, and how long we lav 
atct?nH Tf'^ r* ^^",i ^y^^^^ '^^oded over our 
InKi 1 i^""""^ "'y'^'^ speaking rto the Lieutenant, 
h. ? f !f whispers. Suddenly, one of\he men, ascending 
thiough the hatchway that led down to the tomb of the 
wireless operator, ^passed up a piece of flimsy-paper to 
the Lieutenant. He took it into the unlighted chartHroom, 
and as I fell o^■er the table he struck a mate], nnd by its 
