the great ship, deck beneath deck, with men
everywhere. Men rolled up in coats and oilskins, snatching
half-an-hour's sleep along the crowded gun-batteries, men writing
letters to sweethearts and wives, men laughing and quarrelling, or
singing low-toned, melancholy ditties as they mended worn garments:
hundreds and hundreds of reasoning human entities were crowded in those
steel-walled spaces, each with his boundless hopes and affections, his
separate fears and vices and conceptions of the Deity, and his small,
incommunicable distresses....

Beneath all that again, far below the surface of the grey North Sea,
were men, moving about purring turbines and dynamos and webs of
stupendous machinery, silently oiling, testing and adjusting a thousand
moving joints of metal. There were adjoining caverns lit by the glare
of furnaces that shone red on the glistening faces of men, silent
vaults and passages where the projectiles were ranged in sinister
array, and chilly spaces in which the electric light was reflected from
the burnished and oiled torpedoes that hung in readiness above the
submerged tubes.

Thorogood raised his eyes and stared out across the vast array of the
Battle-fleet. Obedient to the message flashed from the Flagship a few
minutes earlier, the Light Cruisers that had been invisible on the
quarter now emerged from behind the curtain of the mist and were
rapidly moving up to a new position. Presently the same mysterious,
soundless voice spoke again:

YOU ARE MAKING TOO MUCH SMOKE

blinked the glittering searchlight, and anon in the stokeholds of the
end ship of the lee line there was the stokehold equivalent for weeping
and wailing and the gnashing of teeth....

For a couple of hours the Fleet surged onwards in silence and unchanged
formation. The swift Light Cruisers had overtaken the advancing
Battle-fleet, and vanished like wraiths into the haze ahead. The
Captain and the Navigator had joined Thorogood on the bridge, and were
poring over the chart and talking in low voices. The Midshipman of the
Watch stood with eyes glued to the range-finder, turning his head at
intervals to report the distance of the next ahead to the Officer of
the Watch.

A messenger from the Coding Officer tumbled pell-mell up the ladder and
handed a piece of folded paper to the Captain, saluted, turned on his
heel and descended the ladder again. The Captain unfolded the signal
and read with knitted brows. Then he turn