Jaly II, 191b 
Land & Water 
to the destroyers, whose crews meet the cheer of its lighted 
windows coming into port on dark nights. Through its 
hospitable doorway we passed at once into a wide clean 
kitchen and dining room, where bright lights, clean white 
tables, and appetising odours combined in the best of 
welcomes. Half a hundred of the lads we had seen come 
ashore were turning their appetites loose on short orders 
of steak, chops, fried chicken, and the like served with 
\egetab'.es, bread, butter, and mighty mug of hot " Java "; 
all at prices no higher, than those which obtained in the 
United States before the war. Nothing would suit the 
boatswain in charge but that I should test the fare ; and 
having eaten with the fo 'castle messes during rrfy cruise ; 
having seen, moreover, the captain call for the men's dinner 
in preference to his own ; I am in position to say that in 
the American Navy the man before tlie mast eats as well, 
if not better, than his officer. 
Like other men, however, sailors do not live by bread 
alone, and the Club supplies other needs — a library, reading 
and writing room, billiard room, dormitories, baths; most 
important of all from the men's point of view, a cinema show. 
The pictures shown are of both British and American manu- 
facture, but the men naturally prefer the home-made article. 
When a " Fairbanks " or " Pickford " picture is shown — 
well, the theatre, which seats at least eight hundred, is 
packed with officers and men. 
Unless you have been bucking the big seas for a few 
months in a jacknife of a destroyer with mines and torpedoes 
all loose all round, you are not in position to feel the 
unalloyed joy which is to be obtained from the sight of 
" Dag " Fairbanks perched on a chandelier while a saloon 
' brawl .seethes beneath. 
Neither can you feel, as these lads fell, sympathy for the 
simple girl who endures the horrors of virtuous poverty — 
on the screen for the modest compensation of five thousand 
dollars per week. When, after the customary harassments, 
she snuggles into the manly hero's arms, safe at last from 
further persecutions, a sigh passes always through the sailor 
audience. You know — that is, if you were ever young, you 
know — the embrace has recalled to each a whiff of rice 
powder, the caressing touch of a soft cheek, the thrill of 
clinging lips, the wonderful evening when his first girl 
yielded her young body to his arms. 
To see the Club at its best, however, you must go there, 
as I did, to the Saturday evening concert. The savoury 
odours that greeted me at the door were, if possible, richer 
and more enticing. Certain tootles and trumpetings mingled 
with them, filtering in from the theatre where the flotilla 
bandmaster — a pay clerk who bears up bravely under the 
handicap cf having two-thirds of his orchestra always afloat 
— was drilling the residue left him by this cruel war. There 
have been occasions when its vicissitudes left him only the 
drum and trombones, but to-night he was rejoicing in a 
fair instrumental balance. 
It is a point with all of the destroyer skippers to make 
port on this night, if they can. Indeed, if a tithe of the 
curses that have been wished on laggard, six-knot convoys 
ever come home to roost, the U-boat would win hands 
down in the submarine war. , By eight o'clock one could 
see through a thick tobacco haze that the pit and gallery 
were crowded with officers and men. Thick ! It was so 
thick that the calcium beam for the first picture stabbed 
through it like a sunbeam into a dusty room. By the time 
the orchestra split the evening wide open with a rattling 
march, the old familiar HO2 was conspicuous by its absence. 
However the trombones secured atmosphere enough for their 
purposes, T really do not know. But they did. The noise 
was there to prove it. 
After the overture, the flotilla comedian, who had once 
done " time " on a vaudeville circuit, gave a sympathetic 
account of how " It takes a long, tall, brown-skinned gal 
to make a cull'rd preacher lay his Bible down." He was 
really very good ; so good that though the lads smacked 
their lips and said " Oooooh-ooh ! " at the pretty model in 
the " Artist and the Iceman," this was merely the persiflage 
of -the budding male animal, it did not diminish the 
comedian's laurels. 
It requires, however, a sentimental ballad of the good 
old-fashioned sort to get really under a sailor's skin, and 
this happened when a raw old sea-dog, who looked as 
though music and all its affini'ies were quite alien to his 
soul, produced a fine tenor voice from his capacious chest 
and rendered therewith a touching ditty about tears and 
fears and smiles and wiles, sighs, blue eyes, and similar 
of love's phenomena. Talk about a hit ! Not till he had 
sung all he knew about mother, home, sweethearts, wives, 
not till he had wrung their deepest and icnderest feelings 
dry, did they let that man off the stage. 
Sentimental, you say? Bosh! What do we landsmen 
know of sentiment? Surrounded by love, with a surfeit of 
feminity always under our eyes, we arc not in position to 
know the real thing. That which would be sentimentality 
in a landsman is genuine feeling in a sailor, honest and 
sincere, raised to the nth degree by long dreaming in the 
cold night watches on dangerous seas. Living always on 
the borderland between life and death, expectant of the 
torpedo or mine that will send him across, love, friendship 
and affection, the finest of human relations, are in the 
destroyer sailor deepened and intensified. 
1 quite understand the sailor lad who said with deep 
conviction, " .'\11 women are pretty." He merely stated 
truth as it is mirrored in the sailor soul. And many a 
landsman's wife will envy the girl whose destroyer husband 
writes to her every day. His letters, it is true, arrive in 
batches of fifteen and twenty ; but happy in her knowledge of 
the deep love in which his pen is dipped, she reads them 
over and over again. Asked by a comrade what in the 
world he could find to write about in the narrow life at 
sea, this husband answered with cryptic truth : 
" My lad, there's a whole lot of things hidden, yet, from 
you." 
This husband was more fortunate than the other poor 
fellow into whose envelope, addressed to his wife, the naval 
censor slipped by mistake the ardent love letter of another 
man. The writing was different, of course, but the signa- 
ture, " Your loving Bill," was the same. With deep, 
feminine craft, she argued that it would be quite easy for 
him to get some other man to pen the epistle, and it is 
said that a combined affidavit of the captain, censor and 
crew to the effect that her " Bill " was almost ridiculously 
true, was required to persuade her to give him another 
trial. It also goes without saying — every husband knew 
it — that let " Bill " walk never so straitly, he will be under 
suspicion for the rest of his life. 
The same deep sailor feeling turned up again when, 
after the concert, the boatswain showed me the portraits 
of his young wife and two babes, while serving a stirrup 
cup of hot " Java " in his room. They hung over his cot 
where his eyes opened upon them in the morning. I wish 
she could have seen him looked at them ! But she must 
know. • 
From them his glance went to a framed portrait of 
Admiral Sims that stood leaning against the wall, and while 
sipping the "Java," we judiciously debated as to the best 
place to hang it in the Club. If the good man had had 
only his own wish to consult, the Admiral would undoubtedly 
have gone up between his children and wife. But that 
would not have been fair to the other men. It must be 
hung in a good light where everyone could see it the moment 
they stepped into the Club. Just where -it was eventually 
placed I cannot say. But this much I do know — judging 
from the keen disappointment of the entire flotilla when 
illness prevented the Admiral from being with them at the 
Club last Christmas Eve, it does not matter much. His 
image stands next to that of the home folks in the imagina- 
tion of his men. 
Going home, I paused to watch the busy boats, with their 
brilliant moth lights, ferrying a thousand sailors back to 
their floating homes. The roar of the rink had died on the 
hill. With the exception of a few residents, the little doves 
had flown on the 10.30 express back to their cotes. 
At the quay stairs the sputtering arc light glared down 
on a dense, blue mass that was spotted here and there 
■^frith the white service caps of the patrols. It were dan- 
gerous business to have tried to embark as many civilians 
from that one stair. But as each boat called her ship's 
name and pulled in, she instantly filled from a stream of 
leaping, catlike figures; in half a minute shoved off again. 
Even the few " wildies " under care of the patrols, who 
had worshipped with Bacchus instead of the naval Muses, 
dropped in like babes to their cradles. By eleven they were 
all gone. Out on the harbour the golden reflections died 
as ship after ship doused her lights. 
It seemed so happy and peaceful, yet, out there beyond the 
heads, the black seas were still running mountainously. 
Down in their troughs, climbing their watery peaks, half 
a hundred destroyers were moving with their convoys on 
their appointed ways. Already those dark, tempestuous 
seas had snatched away a score of our lads. Within a 
week they were to engulf a destroyer with half her crew. 
Many of those I had just seen off would never come back 
again; their waim dreamings, in the night watches, glowing 
feeling, would be quenched by the cold waves. But — the 
others would carry on ; go out with a smile to face the 
ever-present death ; return for another brief holiday at next 
week's end. 
Notice 
We regret to announce that the Press Bureau declines 
to permit the publication of Mr. Pollen's article entitled 
"The Ships and the Guns." 
