Rudyard Kipling - A Fleet in Being

‘Fun! We’ve got all the fun we want!’ growled a voice in the shadow. A stoker had risen silently as a seal for a breath of air, and stood, chest to the breeze, scanning the Fleet lights.

‘’Ullo! Wot’s the matter with your condenser?’ said the Marine. ‘You’d better take your mucky ’ands off them hammick-cloths or you’ll be spoke to.’

‘Our bunkers,’ said the figure, addressing his grievance to the sea-line, ‘are stuck all about like a lot o’ women’s pockets. They’re stuck about like a lot o’ bunion-plasters. That’s what our bunkers are.’ He slipped back into the darkness. Presently a signalman pattered by to relieve his mate on the bridge.

‘You’ll be ’ung,’ said the Marine, who was a wit, and by the same token something of a prophet.

‘Not if you’re anywhere in the crowd I won’t,’ was the retort, always in a cautious, ‘don’t-wake-him’ undertone. ‘Wot are you doin’ ’ere?’

‘Never you mind. You go on up to the ’igh an’ lofty bridge an’ persecute your vocation. My Gawd! I wouldn’t be a signalman, not for ever so.’

When I met my friend next morning ‘persecuting his vocation’ as sentry over the lifebuoy aft neither he nor I recognised each other; but I owe him some very nice tales.

Next day both Fleets were exercised at steam tactics, which is a noble game; but I was too interested in the life of my own cruiser, unfolding hour by hour, to be intelligently interested in evolutions. All I remember is that we were eternally taking up positions at fifteen knots an hour amid a crowd of other cruisers, all precisely alike, all still as death, each with a wedge of white foam under her nose; wheeling, circling, and returning. The battleships danced stately quadrilles by themselves in another part of the deep. We of the light horse did barn-dances about the windy floors; and precisely as couples in the ball-room fling a word over their shoulders, so we and our friends, whirling past to take up fresh stations, snapped out an unofficial sentence or two by means of our bridge-semaphores. Cruisers are wondrous human. In the afternoon the battleships overtook us, their white upperworks showing like icebergs as they topped the sea-line. Then we sobered our faces, and the engineers had rest, and at a wave of the Admiral’s flag off Land’s End our Fleet was split in twain. One half would go outside Ireland, toying with the weight of the Atlantic en route , to Blacksod Bay, while we turned up the Irish Channel to Lough Swilly. There we would coal, and wait for War. After that it would be blind man’s bluff within a three hundred and fifty mile ring of the Atlantic. We of Lough Swilly would try to catch the Blacksod Fleet, which was supposed to have a rendezvous of its own somewhere out at sea, before it could return to the shelter of the Bay.

There was, however, one small flaw in the rules, and as soon as they were in possession of the plan of campaign the experts of the lower deck put their horny thumbs on it – thus:

‘Look ’ere. Their Admiral ’as to go out from Blacksod to some rendezvous known only to ’isself. Ain’t that so?’

‘We’ve ’eard all that.’ This from an impertinent, new to War.

‘Leavin’ a cruiser be’ind ’im — Blake most likely, or Blenheim – to bring ’im word of the outbreak of ’ostilities. Ain’t that so?’

‘Get on . What are you drivin’ at?’

‘You’ll see. When that cruiser overtakes ’im ’e ’as to navigate back to Blacksod from ’is precious rendezvous to get ’ome again before we intercepts the beggar.’

‘Well?’

‘Now I put it to you. What’s to prevent ’im rendezvousin’ out slow in order to be overtook by that cruiser; an’ rendezvousin’ back quick to Black-sod, before we intercepts ’im? I don’t see that ’is steamin’ rate is anywhere laid down. You mark my word, ’e’ll take precious good care to be overtook by that cruiser of ’is. We won’t catch ’im. There’s an ’ole in the rules an’ ’e’ll slip through. I know ’im if you don’t!’

The voice went on to describe ‘’im,’ the Admiral of our enemy – as a wily person, who would make the Admiralty sit up.

And truly, it came out in the end that the other Admiral had done almost exactly what his foc’sle friends expected. He went to his rendezvous slowly, was overtaken by his cruiser about a hundred miles from the rendezvous, turned back again to Blacksod, and having won the game of ‘Pussy wants a corner,’ played about in front of the Bay till we descended on him. Then he was affable, as he could afford to be, explained the situation, and I presume smiled. There was a ‘hole in the rules,’ and he sailed all his Fleet through it.

We, of the Northern Squadron, found Lough Swilly in full possession of a Sou’-west gale, and an assortment of dingy colliers lying where they could most annoy the anchoring Fleet. A collier came alongside with donkey-engines that would not lift more than half their proper load; she had no bags, no shovels, and her crazy derrick-boom could not be topped up enough to let the load clear our bulwarks. So we supplied our own bags and shovels, rearranged the boom, put two of our own men on the rickety donkey-engines, and fell to work in that howling wind and wet.

As a preparation for War next day, it seemed a little hard on the crew, who worked like sailors – there is no stronger term. From time to time a red-eyed black demon, with flashing teeth, shot into the ward-room for a bite and a drink, cried out the number of tons aboard, added a few pious words on the collier’s appliances, and our bunkers (‘Like a lot of bunion-plasters,’ the stoker had said), and tore back to where the donkey-engines wheezed, the bags crashed, the shovels rasped and scraped, the boom whined and creaked, and the First Lieutenant, carved in pure jet, said precisely what occurred to him. Before the collier cast off a full-blooded battleship sent over a boat to take some measurements of her hatch. The boat was in charge of a Midshipman aged, perhaps, seventeen, though he looked younger. He came dripping into the ward-room – bloodless, with livid lips, for he had been invalided from the Mediterranean full of Malta fever.

‘And what are you in?’ said our Captain, who chanced to pass by.

‘The Victorious , sir, and a smart ship!’ He drank his little glass of Marsala, swirled his dank boat-cloak about him, and went out serenely to take his boat home through the dark and the dismal welter.

Now the Victorious , she is some fourteen thousand nine hundred tons, and he who gave her her certificate was maybe ten stone two – with a touch of Malta fever on him!

We cleaned up at last; the First Lieutenant’s face relaxed a little, and some one called for the instruments of music. Out came two violins, a mandoline, and bagpipes, and the ward-room disported itself among tunes of three Nations till War should be declared. In the middle of a scientific experiment as to how the ship’s kitten might be affected by bagpipes that hour struck, and even more swiftly than pussy fled under the sofa the trim mess-jackets melted away, the chaff ceased, the hull shivered to the power of the steam-capstan, the slapping of the water on our sides grew, and we glided through the moored Fleet to the mouth of Lough Swilly. Our orders were to follow and support another cruiser who had been already despatched towards Blacksod Bay to observe the enemy – or rather that cruiser who was bearing news of the outbreak of War to the enemy’s Fleet.