OUT IN THE DOVER PATROL.

Hokitika Guardian, 24 March 1917, Page 4

OUT IN THE DOVER PATROL.

Graveyard Gossip.

With lights out and everything battened down, we were cutting through the darkness over a heaving sea with the Cherub alone (and hhnailf invisible) to watch over us, and a hundred hidden dangers enoircling ns. Before Night had shut her black

wings over us we had met many ships ridiog drunkenly in the swell, with such a sickening roll to them that you could see every inch of their sloppy

decks With furred spectres of men hanging oa at impossible angles, everything awash in superlative discomfort and drench.

“ They’re the Newfoundlers,” said the captain, as the Mary Mother tossed by like a ridiculous cork and the arms of her semaphore waved and wagged comically. “ Cod fishermen from the Banks—wonderful chaps—pickled to stand anything 1 They’ve got their net out and their gropers down now. ... All of a sudden the net strains and tautens, ana 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—maybe one of our own maybe 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—a bit of one of Julius Ciesar’s fast battle cruisers, perhaps, or something chucked overboard by Francis Drake, or a petrified relic of the Armada, or , . . anything! ” “A HAUNTED GRAVEYARD.” My young skipper smiled through the slit in his Arctic vizor, revealing a flash of white te6th. “ 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, this, 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 in this Destroyer Flotilla for seein’ visions or dreamin’ dreams. We have to keep our eye 3 skinned for solider things. We’ve heard a gentle whisper from some of our sit-by-thc-fiie critics that we’ra not pulling our weight intbe Dover Patrol. Well, maybe If anybody imagines the Channel job’s all marmalade and maraschino, let him bear this >n mind : First o? all, OstßDd and the Jiun base are nearer to Dover than Brighton—a little matter

of geography that people are apt (o overlook; and, secondly, that any ships vs a may ran np against, in the dark and middle of the night.might just as likely be friends as enemies, and we can’t shoot until we’re dead ante.

“There Fritz, out on the maiandei, hai a little the pull of ns. He knows that when ha makes a run every Bhip he meets is an. enemy, and he can let fly with a clear con-, science—if he’s ever had such a thing. On the other hand, we have to chal lenee every craft we meet and wait for t’ne reply before pitching in. And, as yon know—or ought to know —a few seconds in a midnight scrap is everything. If every ”

THE ROAR OF THE WORKS A gentle voice at my elbow—tho soothing invitation of the chief engineer—broke the spell. “If yon’d like to—or—unfreeze yourself, sir,” murmured this hooded moDk of a man, “it wili ba a great pleasure for me to take yon down below and show yon the works.” So, in the utter blackness, we crawled aft, hanging on to the guiderope tooth and nail, and saw all the works—and the hairy-chested, half naked gentlemen who worked them. Above the whme of the turbines be shouted the most entertaining “ Bbcp,” for his engine room is all the world to him, and he talks of it as a mother croons over her babe. I CBn remember nothing of the conversation but one scrap.

“ This,” yelled the C.E., is the condenser,'’ and he banged his fist upon a bulging steel drum, explaining that the water for the boilers bed to be so many degrees purer than the fresh wafer for the crew. “ And that’s why,” he bellowed above tho roar of the works, “we have to keep the handle of the drinking-water pump padlocked." Then he lugged me through a series of man-holes and up dizzy, perpendicular steel ladders into his own private nest where he lives and Bleeps and meditates in a temperature (he is immediately over the boilers) of about 120 deg Fabr. And here he told me, no looger in th& tones of an Epsom bookmaker shouting the odds, but softly and dreamily, how when the war broke out he was surveying and exploring the bed of the sea off the Guinea coast, where the temperature was never lower than 78 end very often 110. “ From Guinea straight to the North Sea—in mid-December ! " ho murmured.

A WORD WITH THE CREW. At this moment an able seaman (wondrously able, to judge from the look of him) popped his head through the cubby door. “Ii the gentleman could spare a moment, sir,” he, “ the crew would like to have a word with him ! ” So aft once more lo find the crew squatting under an 6leofric light playing—auction bridge ! My newest friend, the very able-looking A.B. (I discovered later that he was a B. 4. of Leeds University, ex-H.M.S. Crystal Palac9), had taught them this heithen pastime, and a great game they played. Then they sang to me and yarned to me, ail chattering together, like schco'boys. They declared that, the life vas hell ; bat admitted in the next breath that there was noihing in the wide world to test it. . if only Frbzy’d corns out. The you-gest among them c nfessed to me, as he blushed modestly, that he hod just got. engaged to a of a girl io flarw : ch oq the strength of a possible job in a submatin-•—five y.-a i nervier end two bob a day extra “ hard-lying ” money. “And at the end of yt ur time, Jimmy,” said the C.E. sadly, “ you’ll come out of it as they all do—baldheaded 1 ”

“ It’« worth it— at ths price,” re;, lied the lever, pick ng ud the hand ha had dealt himself. “Mycill? IT make it two hearts! ”