It was a strange dinner for one guest at least—with its flowers and crystal and quiet conversation; the band playing on deck, and the lights of the Fleet twinkling all down the Bay.
There was a Prince in it who was also a Flag-Captain, and he set one thinking; and there were Commanders and Lieutenants in it, and it was all very pretty and gracious; but between me and the menu rose a vision of last year’s play-war—a battleship cleared for action, naked and grim, like a man swimming with a knife between his teeth—a wet and streaming hull thundering through heavy, rain-hammered seas.
Dinner in a Gun-room
‘Well, now you’ve done that,’ said Twenty-One, ‘suppose you come and dine in a Gun-room.’ (We have none on the cruiser, being all ward-room, with a cabin apiece.) ‘I’ll chaperon you to the best disciplined Gun-room in the Fleet. We’ll show you.’
So we went, Twenty-One and me, to another huge battleship, precisely like the Admiral’s; but this time Captains, Commanders, and Lieutenants were invisible, or showed only as superior luminaries far along the decks. We dealt with nothing above the rank of Sub-Lieutenant, and the greetings of that grade are cordial and warm. Down below—it was twice the size of our ward-room—we found their Gun-room, which differs in appointments and fittings from everything Marryat conceived, but I think the old unquenchable spirit persists. Of the twenty odd inhabitants, a dozen at least were Midshipmen, and therefore, as Twenty-One explained, ‘didn’t count.’ They talked among themselves in subdued eager whispers, dropping in to the meal as they came off duty. The senior Sub-Lieutenant (quite nineteen years old) was responsible for the justly vaunted discipline; and it is no small thing to reduce to silence boys of sixteen to eighteen, all full of natural and acquired deviltry. But it was done according to the custom of the Navy and the etiquette of the Gun-room, whose laws change not.
Midshipmen
Here the young Nelson learns to obey, in silence and at a run. He has been broken in on the Britannia, but the Gun-room gives him enduring polish. The Admiral knows a Midshipman rather as the Almighty knows a blackbeetle; the Captain knows him as the Head of Harrow might know a babe in a perambulator; the First Lieutenant knows him as the Head of the Games knows a fag in the Lower Third; but the senior Sub-Lieutenant of the Gun-room knows him as a brand to be snatched from the burning; and works over him accordingly. In return, the Midshipman patronises the Admiral at a safe distance; is blandly superior to his Captain—also at a safe distance; sings time-honoured lampoons about the First Lieutenant at a very safe distance; but most strictly obeys the senior Sub-Lieutenant. For seven years, counting his time in the Britannia, he dresses at a chest and sleeps in a hammock, getting to know himself and his associates with that deadly stark intimacy that only flourishes in the Navy. There are no excuses in his Service. He must not answer back; and he must do what he is told—not immediately, but sooner, much sooner. These are the years that weed out those that have mistaken their calling. The incompetents go home, and curse the Navy evermore. The virtuous stay on and learn to steal brass boiler-tubes for their boats; learn to smoke secretly in the fighting-tops (they are forbidden tobacco till eighteen); fall into and out of all manner of tight places that require dexterity and a cheek of cold-drawn brass; pick up more than they learn under the Instructor from the talk of the Warrant Officers and men and the carefully-watched mistakes of their elders; and when they reach commissioned rank impart their lore to their successors with a dirk-scabbard.
A Republic and a Despotism
If ‘White Jacket’ had not served before the mast, what a picture he might have given us of the Gunroom! It is at once a Republic and a Despotism—the Extreme Left and the unswerving Centre of old tradition. Individually it is always in hot water; collectively it can and does criticise with point and freedom anything and everything on its horizon, from Fleet Manœuvres to the fit of an Instructor’s collar. Pungent, merciless, indomitable is the Gunroom, but it preserves discipline. The senior Sub-Lieutenant (one could not help thinking of O’Brien when he cured Peter of the sea-sickness) stuck a fork into the equivalent for a beam overhead. Ere it ceased vibrating the Midshipmen had gone, flitting like bats; had flung themselves backwards from their seats, and were through the door.
‘That’s when we think the conversation might hurt their little morals,’ said my host. ‘But they can move much quicker than that.’
‘Make ’em do it again,’ said Twenty-One—a Midshipman three years ago. ‘You’re getting awfully slack, I think. What do you do when——?’ he presented a contingency.
‘Oh, then we——’ The Sub-Lieutenant described the course of action with minute particularity, adding: ‘Wouldn’t you like to see it done?’
Set it to my account that I saved somebody’s darling from being butchered to make a Gun-room holiday. But the Midshipmen have an asylum of their own in the School-room, where, I was assured, they were worked within an inch of their lives. The remnant seemed unusually healthy, for when we went out to visit a big smoking-concert on the Flagship I caught glimpses of limber youths racketting in dumb show round their hammocks.
Not being privileged to have speech with them, I asked Twenty-One what the ‘protective diplomacy’ of Midshipmen might be. He gave me to understand that stirring a hornets’ nest with the bare toe was tame and pale beside too thoroughly irritating the junior members of the Gun-room. Had himself been concerned in such revolutions.
‘We got licked, of course,’ he concluded cheerfully, ‘but the seniors let us alone after that. Wasn’t it a beautifully disciplined Mess, though? I wish you could see ’em at sea in weather. There’s a Midshipman (he used the other term) told off to every scuttle to open it between waves. If he lets in any water of course he catches it. I had about five years of that sort of thing. Well, now we’ll go over to the concert.’
‘Uncle Henry’s’ Smoking Concert
Said a shrill voice casually: ‘Are you goin’ to patronise our Uncle Henry’s show to-night?’
‘I think I ought to. I don’t want him to think I’m cutting him. Besides, he’d like to meet one zealous an’ efficient officer. It ’ud cheer him up.’
I whipped round, to see two small boys of blank countenances studying the deck-beams. It was humanly conceivable that ‘Uncle Henry’ might be the Admiral’s nickname, but could two Midshipmen—? I fled lest the ship should blow up under me, and left those zealous and efficient ones to their dignity.
Imagine a quarter-deck seventy-five feet wide and a hundred and twenty long, awninged over, decked with flags and a triple row of white and purple electrics, the massed bands of the Fleet at the far end, and all the rest, from the stern to the snowy barbette, a whirl of uniforms of all ranks: Captains with and without aiguillettes; Commanders, Officers of Marines, in their blue-faced mess-jackets, with the laurelled globe on the lapel, Engineers, Paymasters, Clerks, and the others—a shifting carpet of blue and gold and red and black. The muzzles of the forty-six ton guns sheered up above us, and high over all, on the top of the barbette, which was disguised with flags and carpets, sat the Admiral. It was an amazing spectacle—the Fleet at play, and for some reason, it made me choke. One recovered here men last met at the other end of the world—at Gaspé, Bermuda, Vancouver, Yokohama, Invercargill, or Bombay—rovers and rangers in Her Majesty’s men-of-war. Then we danced; for this also is the custom of the Navy, that when a man has been working like several niggers all day he should, on chance given, dance. And that is why the Naval man dances so well. He begins, as I have