us in that style I would have sat upon his head. Of course he is right, though it isn’t our English way to see through things and define them as the French do. No race on earth can touch us for horses or dogs or prize cattle—or Navy men. It takes centuries to breed the boys who ran submarines through the Dardanelles and the Sound and stayed out in narrow enemy waters for weeks together. Brains and nerves and sea skill can’t be made to order even by a German Kaiser. Navy men should marry young and choose their women from sea families; and then their kids won’t need to be taught. They’ll have the secret of the Service in their blood.”

“That’s all very fine,” observed a Marine Lieutenant reflectively; “but who is going to pay for it all? We can’t. I get 7s. 6d. a day, and shall have 11s. in a year or two; it sounds handsome, but would hardly run to a family. Few in the Navy have any private money, so how can we marry early?”

“Of course we can’t as things go now,” said the Gunnery Lieutenant. “But some day even the Admiralty will discover that the English Navy will become a mere list of useless machines unless the English naval families can be kept up on the lower deck as well as in the wardroom and gun-room. Why, look at the names of our submarine officers whenever they get into the papers for honours. They are always salt of the sea, names which have been in the Navy List ever since there was a List. You may read the same names in the Trafalgar roll and back to the Dutch wars. Most of us were Pongos before that—shore Pongos who went afloat with Blake or Prince Rupert—but then we became sailors, and so remained, father to son. I can only go back myself to the Glorious First of June, but some of us here in the Grand Fleet date from the Stuarts at least. It is jolly fine to be of Navy blood, but not all plum jam. One has such a devil of a record to live up to. In my term at Dartmouth there was a poor little beast called Francis Drake—a real Devon Drake, a genuine antique—but what a load of a name to carry! Thank God, my humble name doesn’t shine out of the history books. And as with the officers, so with the seamen. Half of them come from my own country of Devon—the cradle of the Navy. They are in the direct line from Drake’s buccaneers. Most of the others come from the ancient maritime counties of the Channel seaboard, where the blood of everyone tingles with Navy salt. The Germans can build ships which are more or less accurate copies of our own, but they can’t breed the men. That is the whole secret.”

The Lieutenant-Commander, whose war-scarred destroyer lay below refitting, laughed gently. “There’s a lot in all that, more than we often realise when we grumble at the cursed obstinacy of our old ratings, but even you do not go back far enough. It is the old blood of the Vikings and sea-pirates in us English which makes us turn to the sea; the rest is training. In no other way can you explain the success of the Fringes, the mine-sweepers, and patrols, most of them manned by naval volunteers who, before the war, had never served under the White Ensign nor seen a shot fired. What is our classical scholar here, Cæsar, but a naval volunteer whom Whale Island and natural intelligence have turned into a gunner? But as regards the regular Navy, the Navy of the Grand Fleet, you are right. Pick your boys from the sea families, catch them young, pump them full to the teeth with the Navy Spirit—l’esprit marin of our bi-lingual Sub here—make them drunk with it. Then they are all right. But they must never be allowed to think of a darned thing except of the job in hand. The Navy has no use for men who seek to peer into their own souls. They might do it in action and discover blue funk. We want them to be no more conscious of their souls than of their livers. Though I admit that it is devilish difficult to forget one’s liver when one has been cooped up in a destroyer for a week. It is not nerve that Fritz lacks so much as a kindly obedient liver. He is an iron-gutted swine, and that is partly why he can’t run destroyers and submarines against us. The German liver is a thing to wonder at. Do you know——” but here the Lieutenant-Commander became too Rabelaisian for my delicate pen.

The group had thinned out during this exercise in naval analysis. Several of the officers had resumed their heart-and-club-breaking struggle with the villainous golf course, but the Sub, the volunteer Lieutenant, and the Pongo (Marine) still sat at the feet of their seniors. “May I say how the Navy strikes an outsider like me?” asked Cæsar diffidently. Whale Island, which had forgotten all other Latin authors, had given him the name as appropriate to one of his learning.

“Go ahead,” said the Commander generously. “All this stuff is useful enough for a volunteer; without the Pongos and Volunteers to swallow our tall stories, the Navy would fail of an audience. The snotties know too much.”

“I was going to speak of the snotties,” said Cæsar, “who seem to me to be even more typical of the Service than the senior officers. They have all its qualities, emphasised, almost comically exaggerated. I do not know whether they are never young or that they never grow old, but there is no essential difference in age and in knowledge between a snotty six months out of cadet training and a Commander of six years’ standing. They rag after dinner with equal zest, and seem to be equally well versed in the profound technical details of their sea work. Perhaps it is that they are born full of knowledge. The snotties interest me beyond every type that I have met. Their manners are perfect and in startling contrast with those of the average public school boy of fifteen or sixteen—even in College at Winchester—and they combine their real irresponsible youthfulness with a grave mask of professional learning which is delightful to look upon. I have before me the vision of a child of fifteen with tousled yellow hair and a face as glum as a sea-boot, sitting opposite to me in the machine which took us back one day to the boat, smoking a ‘fag’ with the clumsiness which betrayed his lack of practice, in between bites of ‘goo’ (in this instance Turkish Delight), of which I had seen him consume a pound. He looked about ten years old, and in a husky, congested voice, due to the continual absorption of sticky food, he described minutely to me the method of conning a battleship in manœuvres and the correct amount to allow for the inertia of the ship when the helm is centred; he also explained the tactical handling of a squadron during sub-calibre firing. That snotty was a sheer joy, and the Navy is full of him. He’s gone himself, poor little chap—blown to bits by a shell which penetrated the deck.”

“In time, Cæsar,” said the Commander, “by strict attention to duty you will become a Navy man. But we have talked enough of deep mysteries. It was that confounded Sub, with his French imagination, who started us. What I really wish someone would tell me is this: what was the ‘northern enterprise’ that Fritz was on when we chipped in and spoilt his little game?”

“It does not matter,” said the Gunnery Lieutenant. “We spoilt it, anyhow. The dear old newspapers talk of his losses in big ships as if they were all that counted. What has really crippled him has been the wiping out of his destroyers and fast new cruisers. Without them he is helpless. It was a great battle, much more decisive than most people think, even in the Grand Fleet itself. It was as decisive by sea as the Marne was by land. We have destroyed Fritz’s mobility.”

The men rose and looked out over the bay. There below them lay their sea homes, serene, invulnerable, and about them stretched the dull, dour, treeless landscape of