Novomhcr 29, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
TI 
Organised on the most lavish scale it was a wonderful success. 
Night after night the theatre was crowded with men only just 
out of the front linci Attached to the theatre was a canteen 
where, in the interval, the men could buy cigarettes and even, 
on days of great good fortune, beer. The plot was a brand 
new one, and the villains of the piece were Orosdi and Back, 
two local shopkeepers — pliilanthropists whom the men of 
the Army will remember to their dying day. 
For weeks the great pantomime ran to joyous and crowded 
houses. Every ten days or so the S.S.O." of that Division, 
who helped to ruh the theatre and all its auxiliary branches, 
appeared in the ofhce and implored me brokenly to come and 
.see the finest show on earth. But alas : it was a three days 
journey there and back, and by no possible juggling with time 
was it feasible to J^roduce tl)ree daily newspapers in advance. 
1 shall always regret having missed the great pantomime at 
K '-. But, happily, there are already signs in the air 
which suggest that tJii^ winter, too, somewhere or other on 
the front, it will have a successor, whose brilliance will even 
outshine the production of last' year. 
A Visit to the British Fleet 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
WHILE lunching with Admiral Sir Doveton 
Sturdee in the course of a recent visit to the 
Grand Fleet, which must always remain one of 
the most memorable experiences of my life, 
I \entured the opinion that the work of the British Navy 
in sweeping every enem\' vessel — warship and merchant 
steamer — from the surface of the Seven Seas, was the one 
most o)itstanding achievement of the war. 
" Perhaps you are light," said the victor of the Battle of 
Ihe Falklands thoughtfully, "but you must not lose sight 
"f the fact that to win this victory over the German the 
British sailor has had to win an even more remarkable victory 
over himself. At the ot:tbreak of the war 1 had every con- 
fidence that, in one way or another, we would be able to 
establish a control of the sea quite as complete as that which 
we actually have established ; but, if anyone could have 
assured me that the foundations of that control would have 
to rest upon the Grand Fleet being based in this isolated 
harbour, with the men practically cut off from intercourse 
with the' world for months at a time, I must confess that I 
might have been— well, somewhat less sure, to say the least. 
Certainly I would never have dared more than to hope that 
the moral of the men of the Fleet, far from being lowered by 
the most trying experience of the kind sailors have ever been 
called upon to endure, would actually be heightened. On 
the score of enthusiasm and ' lust for battle,' there could not, 
of course, have been any improvement, but this has given 
way to a cheerful, high-spirited willingness which, if possible, 
makes the Fleet a more efficient fighting unit with every dav 
that passes. If you will observe well the spirit of the men of 
the Grand Fleet at a time when the German Fleet— based 
though it is in the Kiel Canal, where regular shore-leave is 
easy to arrange— is filled with unrest and threatened with 
mutiny, I think you will agree with me the' keeping of the 
British sailor in a healthy state of mind and body, without 
once letting him verge on staleness, is worthy to rank as an 
achievement with that of keeping the enemy off the seas." 
High Spirits 
Evidence of the high spirits of the men of the Grand Fleet 
I liad been haying from the moment I sighted the first car- 
load of returning-from-leave sailors on my journey up from 
London, but the occasion en which I was the most impressed 
was the morning on which I was allowed the honour of 
helping to coal ship by wheeling 2-cwt. sacks on a barrow 
for a couple of hours, an experience the memory of which 
promises Icng to outlast even the not unlingering'stifiness of 
my dorsal muscles. The ship had not been ordered, and was 
not expecting to be ordered to sea, and there was no reason 
to rush the coaling save to be free to take up some other of 
the regular grind of routine drudgery next in order. 
I have watched warships coaling in many ports of the 
world, but never have I seen men working under the stimulus 
of extra shore-leave at Gibraltar, Nagasaki, or Valparaiso get 
the stuff into bunkeis faster than did those lusty m«n of the 
good old " X " t<Jiat misty morning in the Skager Floe. 
Almost every man who was not smoking was singing, and 
even out of the dust-choked inferno of the collier's holds, the 
beat of chesty chorus welled up in the pauses of the grinding 
winches. 
Time and again (until I learned how to defeat the manoeuvre) 
men behind me in the line pushed their barrows in ahcmd and 
made oti with sacks that should have been mine to shift, 
and time and again (until I had found my second wind and 
my "coaling legs") the rollicking Jack Tar just behind me 
put his speeding barrow into one of my by no means slow- 
moving heels. The several hundred tons of coal which went 
into our bunkers between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. on that ordinary 
" routine " morning, was shifted at a rate that- would have 
been entirely creditable to a crew filling their bunkers for 
a long-deferred homeward voyage. 
I did not have another opportunity to discuss wiih Admiral 
Sturdee the manner in which the miracle of " Fleet moral " 
had been wrought, but an officer ofthe battleship on which 
I stayed summed the thing up succinctly. 
'^ i quite understand," 1 had said, "'* why the physical 
health of the Fleet should be the best ever known— why no 
battleship averages more than two or three sick at a time. 
The long months away from the germ-laden air of the land 
is sufficient to account for that. But how, after these three 
years and a half between the Devil, the Deep Sea and the 
Scotch Mist, the men are still exuberant enough to want to 
push barrows of coal faster than a landsman, like myself 
(who is pushing for the sheer luxury of the thing), or how 
they are still full enough of ]oie de vivre to enjoy fits of singing 
between fits of coughing in the' hold of a collier, is beyond 
my comprehension. Hew did you do it ? " 
The reply was prompt and to the point, and seems to 
me to disclose the secret in a nutshell. " By giving 
them," he said, " both rtriore work and more play than they 
had in peace-time ; in other words, by cutting dcwn to a 
minimum the time in which to twirl their thumbs and think." 
Work in War Time 
"Outside polishing brass and holystoning the deck," 
he went on, " there is a deal more work on a warship in war- 
time than in days of peace, so that we are never hard put to 
find a field for extra eft'ort. We learn much quicker from 
practice than we did from theory, and there is an astonishing 
amount of work going on all the time to the end that the 
ship shall be kept as up to date as possible in all her equip- 
ment. The increase of a ship's offensive and defensive 
ix)wer, making her better to fight with and safer to fight in 
is naturally a work in which the men are vitally interested, 
and they go into it with a will. We try as far as possible 
to avoid simply putting the men through the motions of 
work, like doing unnecessary painting or scrubbing, for 
instance. If the ship .does not provide for the moment 
enough real work, we try to find it ashore. For the next 
few days, for example, we are sending several himdred men 
ashore to make roads on one of the islands. They are very 
keen about the change, and I have heard them speaking about 
it all to-day. That kind of a thing works much better than 
simply improvising work on board- It gives variety, and 
the men feel that they are doing something useful instead of 
simply being kept busy." 
" So much for work. On the score of pla3*, we aim to 
give the men rather more athletic sports than they would 
have in port in peace-time, though all of it has to be carried 
on with many less ' frills ' — flag-dressings, tea-parties and the 
like— under the limiting conditions of always being ready to 
put to sea at notice of an hour or two. On the ship, doubling 
round the deck for exercise is kept tip regularly, as is also a 
certain number of Swedish drills. Every encouragement is 
given to tlie men to box, and the ship, squadron and Fleet 
championships in the various classes are, of course, great 
events. There is scarcely a drifter or patrol-boat without 
one or more sets of boxing-glcfves, for there is no form of 
sport quite as well calculated to exercise both mind and body 
in restricted quarters. 
" Water-sports— swimming, rowing and sailing — are kept 
up about as in peace-time, though here the long spell of 
inclement weather makes the winter rather a longer ' closed 
season ' than farther south. Ashore there are several in- 
(lifi'erent cricket and football grounds, though not, howe\'er, 
nearly enough for tlie normal demand of the great number- 
it runs well up into six figures- of able-bodied, sport-loving 
men in the Fleet. A good deal of hockey is played, and we 
