8 
Land &: Water 
March 7, 191 S 
single ship readv to sail at a moment's notice is as much <)f 
a figure of speech as is the similar one about the army wlucli 
is going to fight' to the last man. A good many moments 
must inevitahlv elapse between the time definite orders come 
to sail and the actual getting under weigh. But the final 
preparations can be reduced to such a routine that the ship 
receiving them <.in be got ready to sail witli h.irdlv more 
than a ripple of unusual activity appearing in tli.^ ebb and 
flow of the life -.f those who man her. No river ferr\-boat 
ever cast off her moorings and paddled out on one of Iicr 
endlessly repeated shuttlings with less apparent effort than 
the "Zeus." when, after gulping some scores of fathoms of 
Gargantuan anchor chain into her capacious maw, she 
pivoted easily around in the churning welter of reversed 
screws, took her place in line, and followed in the wake of the 
flagship toward the point where a notch in the bare rounded 
periphery of encircling hills marked the way to the open sea. 
Nowhere else in the temperate latitudes is there so strange 
a meeting and mingling place of airs and waters than where 
we were. The butterfly chases of sunshine and showers even 
in December and January are suggestiveof nothing so much 
as what a South Pacific Archipelago would be but with fifty 
or sixty degrees colder temperature. Dancing golden sun- 
motes were playing spirited cross-tag with slatily sombre 
cloud-shadows as we nosed out through the mazes of the 
booms, but with the first stinging slaps of the vicious cross- 
swells of a turbulent sea, a swirling bank of fog came 
waltzing over the ainies.sly chopping waters, and reared a 
vaporous wall across our patli. 
Line Ahead 
The flagship melted into the milling mists, and dimmed 
down to an amorphous blur with just enough outline to 
enable us a sight to correct our position in line. In turn, 
the towered and pinnacled head-on silhouette of the third 
ship grew soft and shadowy, and where proper perspective 
would have placed the fourth was a swaying Wisp of indeter- 
minate image which might just as well have been an immin- 
ently wheeling seagull as a distantly reeling super-dread- 
nought. The comparison is by no means so ridiculous as it 
sounds, for only the day before a naval flying-man had told 
me how he once started to bring his seaplane down on sighting 
. a duck (which was really some hundreds of feet in the air) 
because he took it for a destroyer, and how, later, he had 
failed to "straighten out " quickly enougli because he thought 
a trawler was a duck in flight. 
The lean grey shadows which slipped ghostily into step 
with us in the fog-hastened twilight of three o'clock might 
just as well (had we not known of the rendezvous) have been 
lurking wolves as protecting sheep-dogs. 
'Now that we've picked up our destroyer.-," said the officer 
who -paced the quarter-deck with me, "we'l be getting on 
our way. Let's go down to tea." 
Snioke, masts, funnels, and wave-washed hulls, the 
Whistleresque outlines of our swift guardians had blurred to 
blankness as I looked back from, the companion-wav, and 
only a misty golden halo, flashing out and dying down on our 
port bow, told where the flotilla leader was talking to the 
flagship. 
Tea is no less important a function on a British warship 
than it is ashore, and nothing short of an action is allowed 
to interfere with it. Indeed, how the cheerful clink of the 
teacup was heard in the prelude to the diapason of the guns 
was revealed to me a few days ago, when the commander 
allowed me to read a few personal notes he had written 
while the light cruiser he was in at the time was returning 
to port after the Battle of Jutland. "The enemy being in 
sight," it read, "we prepared for action stations" and went 
to tea." A few minutes later, fingers, which had crooked on 
the hand es of the teacups were adjusting the nice instru- 
ments of precision that laid the guns for what was destined 
to prove the greatest naval battle in history. 
Tea was about as usualwith us that day, save that the 
f)fficers who came in at the change of watch' were dressed for 
busmess—those from the bridge and conning-tower in oil- 
skms or "lammy" jackets and sea-boots, and the engineers 
m greasy overalls. A few words of "shop "---steam pressure 
revolutions, speed, force and direction of the wind, and 
the hkc— passed in an undertone between men sitting next 
each other, but never became general. The sponginess of 
the new potato ' bread and the excellence of the margarine 
came in for comment, and some one spoke of having rushed 
off a letter just before sailing, ordering a recently advertised 
self hair-cutter." A di.scussion as to just how this remark- 
able contrivance worked followed, the con.sensus of ..pinion 
being that it must be on the safety-razor principle, but that 
It couldn't possibly 1)0 worth the guinea charged \11 that 
I recall having been said of what might be taking us to sea 
was when an officer likely to know volunteered that we 
wouH possibly be in sight of land in the morning, and some 
speculation arose as to whether it would be Norway or 
Jutland. A recently joiiied R.N.V.R. provoked smiles 
when he suggested Heligoland. 
The cabin which I had been <Kciipying in port was one 
located immediately under the conning-tower, and used by 
the navigating officer when the ship was at sea, the arrange- 
ment being that I was to go aft and live in his regular calkin 
while we were outside. Going forward, after tea, I threw 
together a few things for my servant to carry back to my 
temporary quarters. Groping aft in Stygian blackness along 
the windward side of tlu' ship, I encountered spray in clouds 
driving across even the lofty fi/c'sle deck. The wind appeared 
to have shaken off its flukiness as we cleared the headlands, 
and, blowing with a swinging kick behind it, was rolling up 
a sea to match. I did not need to be told by the sea-booted 
sailor whom I bumped on a ladder that it wasn't "goin' t' 
be no nite fer lam's," to know that there was something 
lively in the weather line in pickle, probably to be uncorkecl 
before morning. 
The grate, robbed of its chimney, was cold and empty 
when I went in for seven o'clock dinner — half an hour earlier 
than in-port^and there was just the suggestion of chill in 
the close air of the ward-room. .An engineer-lieutenant who 
started to reminisce about a winter cruise he had once made 
in the Arctic was peremptorily hushed up with a request to 
"talk about .something warmer." A yarn about chasing 
the Konigsberfi in the lagoons of East Africa was more 
kindly received, and an R.N.V.K.'s account of how his ship 
carried Moslem pilgrims from Singapore to Jeddah on their 
way to Mecca brought a genial glow of warmth with it. 
There was something strangely cheering in his account of 
how, when there was a following simoon blowing across the 
brassy surface of the Red Sea, the Lascar stokers used to go 
mad with the heat and jump overboard in their delirium. 
The air seemed less dank and chill after that story. I ven- 
tured a "sudorific" contribution by telling of the way they 
rhade "desert storms" in the California movies with the aid 
of buckets of sand and a "wind machine." The whole table 
showed interest in this — probably because it was so far 
removed from "shop" — and sat long over port and coffee 
planning a "blower" that would discharge both wind and 
sand,— in sufficient quantities to give the "desert storm" 
illusion over the restricted angle of the movie lens — at the 
turning of a single crank. One does not need to be long 
upon a British battleship to find out that the inventive 
genius of the Anglo-Saxon race is not all confined to the 
American branch. 
Between officers. on watch and those resting to relieve, the 
after-dinner gathering around what had once been a fire was 
a small and rapidly dwindling one. As I got up to go to my 
cabin, the captain of marines quieted the pet cockatoo on 
his shoulder long enough to say, as we would probabh' be 
at action stations earlj' in the morning, I might find it of 
interest to come up to his turret, where he had a "jolly 
smart crew." "\Ve usually do 'B.J. 2' at daybreak when 
we're out," he said, "just on the chance that we may flush' 
some sort of a Hun in the early light. Quite like snipe- 
shooting, you know." 
A middy whom I met outside said something about the 
way the barometer had been chasing its tail on the drop 
ever since we got under weigh, and when I turned on the light 
in my cabin I noticed that the arrows on the navigating 
officer's instrument indicated a fall of thirty points since 
noon. The keen whistling of the rising wind shrilled with 
steady insistence, and the wide swinging swells from the 
open sea were lock-stepping along with a tread that was 
just beginning to lift the great warship in a swaggering 
Jack Tar roll. 
On the floor of the cabin was a flannel bulldog with 
"manipulable" legs and a changeable expression. Its name 
was "Grip" (so "the pilot" had told me), and it had been 
his constant companion ever since it was presented to him 
on the eve of his first sailing as a midshipman.- The only 
time they had ever been separated was on the occasion a 
colleague, who had borrowed it as a mascot in a game of 
poker, threw it overboard in chagrin when the attempt to 
woo fickle fortune proved a failure. Luckily, the ship was 
lying in a river, and the dog floated back on the next tide, 
and was fished out with no damage to anything but the 
compression bladder which worked its bark. The navi- 
gating officer left the companionable little beast in his cabin, 
so he explained, to give it the proper home touch for mv 
first night at sea with the British Navy. Cocking "Grip" 
up in the genial glow of the electric grate in an attitude of 
"watchful waiting," I crawled into bed, pulled up the adjust- 
