Part 5 (1/2)

It is a safe offer. The civilian only sees that the sea is a vast place, divided between wisdom and chance. He only knows that the uttermost oceans have been swept clear, and the trade-routes purged, one by one, even as our armies were being convoyed along them; that there was no island nor key left unsearched on any waters that might hide an enemy's craft between the Arctic Circle and the Horn. He only knows that less than a day's run to the eastward of where he stands, the enemy's fleets have been held for a year and four months, in order that civilisation may go about its business on all our waters.

TALES OF ”THE TRADE”

(1916)

”THE TRADE”

They bear, in place of cla.s.sic names, Letters and numbers on their skin.

They play their grisly blindfold games In little boxes made of tin.

Sometimes they stalk the Zeppelin, Sometimes they learn where mines are laid Or where the Baltic ice is thin.

That is the custom of ”The Trade.”

Few prize-courts sit upon their claims.

They seldom tow their targets in.

They follow certain secret aims Down under, far from strife or din.

When they are ready to begin No flag is flown, no fuss is made More than the shearing of a pin.

That is the custom of ”The Trade.”

The Scout's quadruple funnel flames A mark from Sweden to the Swin, The Cruiser's thundrous screw proclaims Her comings out and goings in: But only whiffs of paraffin Or creamy rings that fizz and fade Show where the one-eyed Death has been.

That is the custom of ”The Trade.”

Their feats, their fortunes and their fames Are hidden from their nearest kin; No eager public backs or blames, No journal prints the yarns they spin (The Censor would not let it in!) When they return from run or raid.

Unheard they work, unseen they win.

That is the custom of ”The Trade.”

I

SOME WORK IN THE BALTIC

No one knows how the t.i.tle of ”The Trade” came to be applied to the Submarine Service. Some say that the cruisers invented it because they pretend that submarine officers look like unwashed chauffeurs. Others think it sprang forth by itself, which means that it was coined by the Lower Deck, where they always have the proper names for things.

Whatever the truth, the Submarine Service is now ”the trade”; and if you ask them why, they will answer: ”What else could you call it? The Trade's 'the trade,' of course.”

It is a close corporation; yet it recruits its men and officers from every cla.s.s that uses the sea and engines, as well as from many cla.s.ses that never expected to deal with either. It takes them; they disappear for a while and return changed to their very souls, for the Trade lives in a world without precedents, of which no generation has had any previous experience--a world still being made and enlarged daily. It creates and settles its own problems as it goes along, and if it cannot help itself no one else can. So the Trade lives in the dark and thinks out inconceivable and impossible things which it afterwards puts into practice.

It keeps books, too, as honest traders should. They are almost as bald as ledgers, and are written up, hour by hour, on a little sliding table that pulls out from beneath the commander's bunk. In due time they go to my Lords of the Admiralty, who presently circulate a few carefully watered extracts for the confidential information of the junior officers of the Trade, that these may see what things are done and how. The juniors read but laugh. They have heard the stories, with all the flaming detail and much of the language, either from a chief actor while they perched deferentially on the edge of a mess-room fender, or from his subordinate, in which case they were not so deferential, or from some returned member of the crew present on the occasion, who, between half-shut teeth at the wheel, jerks out what really happened. There is very little going on in the Trade that the Trade does not know within a reasonable time. But the outside world must wait until my Lords of the Admiralty release the records. Some of them have been released now.

SUBMARINE AND ICE-BREAKER

Let us take, almost at random, an episode in the life of H.M.

Submarine E9. It is true that she was commanded by Commander Max Horton, but the utter impersonality of the tale makes it as though the boat herself spoke. (Also, never having met or seen any of the gentlemen concerned in the matter, the writer can be impersonal too.) Some time ago, E9 was in the Baltic, in the deeps of winter, where she used to be taken to her hunting grounds by an ice-breaker.