"A FLEET IN BEING."

Otago Daily Times, Issue 11397, 14 April 1899, Page 7

"A FLEET IN BEING."

Rr.dyard Kipling is, we are told, on the ■mend, and right glad every patriotic Britisher fs. for we cannot afford to lose a man in the prime of life who writes so'magnificently on the British Empire. His "Flag of England" should be. known, by every soldier and sailor ' and civilian; and Ilia; reverent and finelyrconceived national hymn "The Recessional" is almost a. necessary that, strong as we are, we are not to forger ourselves and become arrogant in oiir power. . » His latest work is published in .a booklet witii my heading on the title' page. As a. guest he accompanied the Channel squadron on' two of .its annual manoeuvres, the last some months ago. At the conclusion of the last of the trips I remember reading that the admiral gave an entertainment iq the captains and senior officers., Kipling was also present, and by request ■eeittd "The Flag of England." The enthusiasm was intense, and recitation followed recitation, the company-winding up hy carrying him shoulder high. With this preliminary I'll give you a specimen or two of his graphic writing on "A Fleet in Being." ' Toe Squadron leaving Portsmouth numbered a dozen or so battleships and seyentcer. or eighteen cruisers. He was immediately struck with the, iact that the tyi'CTiiy,-knot cruiser he was on was almost entirely controlled by men under 30 years of age; and when the squadron went down the harbour, nipping in and out like a hansom in the West End,, he could not help feeling a little flurried; and this feeling wasn't m any way allayed when lie was comfortingly told not to be alarmed if he found a cruiser's ram in the small of his. back about midnight. GENERAL POST. Outside the harbour the squadron of 50 ships was strung out into a six-mile line. "As soon as we found room, the flagships began to signal, and there followed, a most fascinating game of general post. . The Admiral wreathed himself in jlags, strings of them; the signalman on our' high, narrow, little bridge, telescope jammed to his eye, reads out the letters of that order; the qiiarterm;'.£.ter spins the infantile wheel, the officer of (he bridge rumbles requests down the speaking tube to the engine room, and away we ilee to take up station at such and such a distance irom our neighbours? ahead and astern, at such and such an angle on the Admiral, his bow or beam. The end of it was -a miracle to lay eyes. The long line became four parallel lines of strength and beauty, a mile and a-quarter from flank to flank, and thus we abode till evening. Two hundred yards or so behind us the rum of our next nstern planed through still water; an equal distance in front of us lay the oily water from the screw of our next ahead. 80 it was ordered, and so we

did, as though glued into position. WHEELING, CIRCLING, RETURNING.

'; Next day boili fleets were exercised at steani tactics, which is a noble game, but I was too interested in the life of my own cruiser, unfolding hour by hour, to be intelligently interested in evolutions. All I remember is that we were externally talcing, up positions at fifteen knots an hour amid a crowd of other cruisers, all precisely alike, all still as death, each with :t. wedge of white foam under her np.se; wheeling, circiing. returning. The battlesnips danced stately quadrilles by themselves in another part of the deep. We of the'light-horse did barn dances about the windy floors, and precisely as couples in r.lr ballroom fling a word ovei their siiculders, so we and our friends, whirling Piist to take up new stations, snapped out. an unofficial sentence or two by means of our liridgc-scmaphorcs. Cruisers are won(lrons himia:;. In the afternoon the battleships overtook us, thoii white.upper .works shewing- like icebergs as they topped the «;ti line. Then we sobered our faces, and the engineers had a rest. .ALMOST INFERNAL MOBILITY.

■"No-description will miike you realise the aimosi. infernal mobility of a ileet, at sea. I have seen.ours called, to nil appearances, out of the deep—split in twain at a word, and, ■ii n. avovJ, soni: skimming beyond the hori •Mm, string out. as vultures siring out ))iiwrully in the hot sky above a dying beast; flung like a lasso, gathered anew at ,i riata is (•oiled hl Lhe saddle bow ; dealt out <jarufashion over 50 miles of green tables. : picked up. sliullled, and re-dealt a.s the game, changed. 1 have seen cruisers1 flown like hawks, ridden like iiorsas ai a f:lost finisii, and inanojiivred like bicycles ; hut the wonder of their appearance and disappearam;" never failed. The Powerful spoke, and m

For Cliilclrcn's Hackins Cough take Woods' Great Peppermint Cure —Is 6d and 3s (id.

10 minute: the cruiser-squadron had vanished : each ship hiking her own matches and sulphur to make a hell of her own."

NQUIKTING DEATH,

A.nd Kipling was able to form a conception of what this hell would be like, for the cruiser he was on indulged in its monthly practice, an island being the target ; and after describing the sighting and firing and working of the guns, together with tho effect upon the island rock, he writes :—" Then the horror of the thing began to soak into me. What I had seen was a slow peddling-out of Admiralty allowance for a month; and it seemed to me more like squirting death through a hose than any ordinary gun-prac-tice. What will it be when all the ammunition hoists are working, when the Maxim water-jacket piilfs olf in steam, when the three-pounder charges come up a dozen at a time to he spent 20 to the minute, when the «ole limit of four-inch fire ife the speed with which the shells and. cases can be handled? What will it 1)0 when the Real Thing is upon SIGNALLING. In-referring to a mistake made in one ot the evolutions. Kipling has a word to say about the signalmen:—"Now the flagship had some 50 or 60 signalmen, and a bridge as broad as a houseboat and as clear as a ballroom. Our bridge was, perhaps, 4ft broad; the roar of :i stoko-hold ventilating fan, placed apparently for that purpose, carefully sucked up two-tliirds of every shouted order ; and between tho bridge and the poop the luckless signalman, for want of a passage overhead, had to run an obstacle race along the crowded deck. We owned six signalmen. Aftfe watching them for a week, I was prepared to swear that «;ach had six wins and eight cinder-proof eyes ; but the flagship thought otherwise. I heard what the signalmen thought later on ; but that was by no mentis for publication.

Mi-M WHO TAKE THEIR CHANCES.

■• As 1 have already said, most of the officers are comparatively young; but they have al-" ready seen and gone through enough to sober Ulysses. But it doesn't. Thanks to our destroyers, which give them an independent command early in their career, they have learned while yet young how to handle 200 ft of shod death that cover a mile in two minutes, turn in their own length, and leap •to racing speed almost before a man knows he lias signalled the engine room. In these craft they risk the extreme perils of the sea, and make experiments of a- kind that would not read well in prim,.■' It would take

much to astonish them when, at the completion of their command, they are shifted, say, to a racing cruiser They have been within spitting distance of collision and bumping distance of the bottom ; they-have, tested their craft in long-drawn Channel gales, not grudgingly or of necessity because they could hot find liarbour, but because they ' wanted to know, don't you know'; and in that embroilment have been very literally thrown together with their men. This all makes for hardiness, coolness of head, and, above all, resource."

But perhaps the finest word paintings in the series (ire those referring to the engineers and stokers, and these I'll give you next week.