OUT IN THE DOVER PATROL

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3022, 8 March 1917, Page 6

OUT IN THE DOVER PATROL

GRAVEYARD GOSSIP

("Daily Mail" Special.) With lights out and everything battened down we were cutting through the darkness over a heaving sea with the Cherub' alone (and himself invisible) to watch ovor us, and a hundred hidden dangers encircling us. Before Night had shut her black wings over us we had met many ships rifling drunkenly in the swell, with such a sickening roll to them that you could see every incli of their sloppy decks with furred spectres of men hanging on at impossible angles, - everything awash in superlative discomfort and (Trench. . ■, "They're the NewfcundlersJ" said tne captain, as the Mary Mother tossed by like a- ridiculous cork aild the arms of her semaphore waved and wagged comically. "Cod-fishermen from the Banks—wonderful cbaps—pickled " to stand anything! They've got their net out and their gropprs down now. . ."

All of a sudden the net strains and tautens,- and the Lord only knows — they don't —what they've hooked. MayBe a submarine (you never know)— maybe one of Fritz's Christmas plum puddings, full of high explosive plums— ma.vtje one of our own ditto—or maybp nothing more than a big fish. . . . The floor of this bit of sea. is strewn with all sorts of funny things. Sets you thinking hard when you scoop some of 'em up—n. bit of one of Julius Caesar's fast battle-cruisers, perhaps, or something chucked overboard by Francis Drake, or a petrified relic of uie Armada, or ... anything!"

"A Haunted Craveyard." _My yonng skipper smiled through the slit in his Arctic vikor, revealing a flash of white teeth. ""'When you come to think of it," he went on, "the English Channel has been the Kensal Green of ships and sailormen for a thousand years! Night after night, on this demoralisin', bridge, I stand and stare, and stare,' and stare at—nothing! It's a haunted 'graveyard, tl:is, my 'son; and if you let yourself go, you'd see all sorts of uncanny, goblin things. But, luckily for us, there's no time fn this Destroyer Flotilla for seein , visions or'dreamin' dreams. We have to keep our eyes skinned for solider things.

'.'We've heard a gentle whisper froiii some of our sit-by-the-fire critics that we're not pulling our weight in the Dover Patrol. Well, maybe . If anybody imagines tho Channel job's all marmalade and* marashebino, let. him bear this in' mind: First of all, Ostend and tTif) Hun base nrc neiirw to Dorer\ than Brighton—a little matter of geography tha't people are apt to overlook; and, "secondly, that any skips wo may run up against in the dark and middle of the night might just as likuly be Menus as enemies, and we can't shoot until we're dead sure.

''There Frit , .!, out on the marauder, has a. little pull of us. Ho knows that when he makes a run "ftvevy ship ho meets is an enemy, and ),e can let fly with a. clear conscience-—i? he's ever liaci such a thing. On t-Jio other hand, we have to challenge ftrcry craft wo meet and wait for the reply before pitofiing in. And, as you know—or ought to know—a few 'Seconds in a 'luidnigiit scrap is everything. If ever ''

The Roar, of the Works. A gentle voice at my elbow—the soothing invitation of the chief engineer—broke the spell. "If you'd like to —er —unfreeze yourself, sir," murmured this hooded monk of a man. "it will, bo a great pleasure for me to take you down below and show you the works."- So, in the utter blackness, we crawled aft, hanging, en to the guide-rope tooth and nail, and saw all the works l —and .the hairychested, half-naked gentlemen who worked them. Above the whine of the turbines he shouted tho most entertaining "shop," for his engine-room is all the world to him, and ho talks of it as a mother croons over her babe. I can remember nothing of the conversation but one scrap. "This," yelled the C.E., "is the condensei'i" and he banged his fi§t upon a bulging steel drum, explaining" that the water for tho boilers had to bo so many degrees purer than the fresh water for the crew. "And that's why," he bellowed above the roar of the works, "wo have to keep tho handle of the drinking-water pump padlocked I"

Then ho lugged me through a scries of manhole? and up dizzy, perpendicular steel ladders into his own private nest, where ho lives and sleeps and meditates in a temperature (he is'immediately over tho boilers) of about 120deg. Fahr. And here, ho told me, no longer in the tones of an Epsom bookmaker shouting the odds, but softly and dreamingly, ho\v when the war broke out ho was surveying and exploring tho bed of tho sea off the Guinea coast, where the temperature was never lower than 78 and very often 110. ' > "From Guinea straight to the North Sea —in mid-December!" he murmured. A Word With the Crew., • * At this moment an able seaman (wondrmisly- able, to judge from the look of him) popped his head through the cubby door. "If the gentleman icould spare a moment,. sir,'/ said he. "the crew would like to have a word with him!"

So aft once more to find the crew squatting under an electric light playing—auction bridge! My newest 'friend, tho very able-looking A.B. (1 discovered later that ho was a B.A. of Leeds University,- ex-H.'M.S. Crystal Palace)', had taught them this heathen pastime, and a great game they, played. Then they sang to mo and yarned to me, all chattering together, like schoolboys. They declared that the life was hell; but "admitted in the next breath that there was nothing in .the wide world to beat it' . . . if only Fiitzy'd come

out. The youngest among them confessed to me, as he blushed modestly, that he had just engaged to a peach of a girl in Harwich on the strength of a job in a submarine—five years' eervims and two bob a -lay extra "hard-iying ,, money. _ "And at the cm!oor! r your lime. Jhnmy," said the U.K. sadly, "you'ii •Mir.e cut of it as they all do—baldheaded!"

"It's worth it—at the pries;" ■ replied the lover, picking, up the hand he had dealt himself. "My call? I'll make it two hearts!"