t bringing them back from their
short two hours' leave on shore!

Another gathering, in the Captain's room, for tea. The talk turns on a
certain popular play dealing with naval life, and a Commander describes
how the manuscript of it had been brought to him, and how he had revelled
in the cutting out of all the sentimentalisms. Two men in the
play--friends--going into action--shake hands with each other "with tears
in their eyes." A shout of derisive laughter goes up from the tea-table.
But they admit "talking shop" off duty. "That's the difference between us
and the Army." And what shop it is! I listen to two young officers, both
commanding destroyers, describing--one, his adventures in dirty weather
the night before, on patrol duty. "My hat, I thought one moment the ship
was on the rocks! You couldn't see a yard for the snow--and the
sea--_beastly_!" The other had been on one of Admiral Hood's monitors,
when they suddenly loomed out of the mist on the Belgian coast, and the
German army marching along the coast road to Dunkirk and Calais marched no
more, but lay in broken fragments behind the dunes, or any shelter
available, till the flooding of the dikes farther south completed the
hopeless defeat which Admiral Hood's guns had begun.

Then the talk ranges round the blockade, the difficulties and dangers of
patrol work, the complaints of neutrals. "America should understand us.
Their blockade hit us hard enough in the Civil War. And we are fighting
for their ideals no less than our own. When has our naval supremacy ever
hurt them? Mayn't they be glad of it some day? What about a fellow called
Monroe!"--so it runs. Then its tone changes insensibly. From a few words
dropped I realise with a start where these pleasantly chatting men had
probably been only two or three days before, where they would probably be
again on the morrow. Some one opens a map, and I listen to talk which, in
spite of its official reticence, throws many a light on the vast range of
England's naval power, and the number of her ships. "Will _they_ come out?
When will they come out?" The question runs round the group. Some one
tells a story of a German naval prisoner taken not long ago in the North
Sea, and of his remark to his captors: "Yes, we're beaten--we know
that--but we'll make it _hell_ for you before we give in!"

For that final clash--that Armageddon that all think must come, our
sailors wait, not despising their enemy, knowing very well tha