r mistrustfully; but Time, the
surest of teachers, soon convinced us of the essential harmlessness of
our fellows. And then we played quoits, and danced and listened to the
band, forgetting the things which were behind and disregarding (for the
moment) the things which were before. Disregarding, but not quite
forgetting. When the last game was over and the last pipe lighted, and
the good, cool hours drew on, men used to sit in little groups watching
the flash of waves tripping and spilling over smooth black furrows; and
then they talked. The C.I.V. officers talked of Lee-Enfields,
trajectories, mass and volley firing; the Indian Staff Corps men, who
were going out on special service, spoke of commissariat and transport,
of standing patrols and Cossack posts, of bivouacks, entrenchments,
vedettes, contact squadrons, tactical sub-units, demolitions and
entanglements. In those dark hours, while alien stars were rising and
swinging westward over the masthead, hard, fit, clear-headed young men
talked coolly and with common sense of the big business before them. The
evening consultations were all that we gave to the future. The past was
even less openly recognised; but it proclaimed itself eloquently in the
withered bunches of flowers on this and that cabin table, in the demand
for the ship's notepaper, in the women's trinkets worn by men who, under
ordinary circumstances, would rather wear sack-cloth than jewellery:
emblems, all of them, of thoughts that travelled the white road between
the rudder and the horizon.

In that strange detached world of ours, energy alone was unsuspended. It
was even stimulated, and in a race and class of men not accustomed to
look inward for recreative resources manifested itself in a violent and
unresting pursuit of artificial amusements. In this pursuit all our days
were passed. The morning sun streams into the port-cabins, the diligent
quartermaster brings our toys on deck and gravely arranges them;
throughout the day we play with them until we are tired, when they are
flung aside untidily; again the quartermaster returns, and, like a kind
nurse, puts them away. The sun slants through the starboard windows and
is quenched in the waters; a little talking, a little dancing, a little
music, and we are all asleep. Such were our days. And ever before,
behind, around and beneath us the moving, mysterious sea, wrinkled and
old as the world, but blowing airs of eternal youth from its crumbling
ridges