royer
Commander's heart towards the steam-drifter.

On the outbreak of war, however, the steam fishing fleets became an arm
of the great Navy itself, far-reaching as its own squadrons. They
exchanged their nets for guns and mine-sweeping paraphernalia: they
became submarine-hunters, mine-sweepers, fleet-messengers and patrollers
of the great commerce sea-ways in the South. They became a little Navy
within the Navy, in fact, already boasting their own peculiar traditions,
and probably as large a proportion of D.S.C.'s as any other branch of the
mother Service.

They are a slow, crab-gaited community that clings to gold earrings and
fights in jerseys and thigh boots from which the fish-scales have not
altogether departed. Ashore, on the other hand (where their women rule),
they consent to the peaked cap and brass buttons of His Majesty's
uniform, and wear it, moreover, with the coy self-consciousness of a
bulldog in a monogrammed coat.

Link by link they have built up a chain of associations with the parent
Navy that will not be easily broken when the time comes for these little
auxiliaries to return to their peaceful calling. They have worked side
by side with the dripping Submarine; they have sheltered through storms
in the lee of anchored Battleships; they have piloted proud Cruisers
through the newly-swept channels of a mine-field, and brought a
Battle-cruiser Squadron its Christmas mail in the teeth of a Northern
blizzard. In token of these things, babies born in fishing villages from
the Orkneys to the Nore have been christened after famous Admirals and
men-of-war, that the new generation shall remember.

The drifter that had altered course slowly came round again when the last
of the Destroyers swept past, and the three figures in the bows ducked as
she shipped a bucket of spray and flung it aft over the tiny wheel-house.
One of the figures turned and stared after the retreating hulls.

"Confound 'em," he said. "Just like the blooming Destroyers, chucking
their weight about as if they owned creation, and making us take their
beastly wash." He took off his cap and shook the salt water from it.
One of the other two chuckled. "Never 'mind, Mouldy, it will be your
turn to laugh next time we go to sea, when you're perched on the
forebridge sixty feet above the waterline, and watching our
Destroyer-screen shipping it green over their funnels."

Mouldy Jakes shook his head gloomily. "Laugh!" he echoed. "Th