THE VICTORY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20288, 22 December 1927, Page 15

THE VICTORY.

WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS SHIP,

CENTRE OF ENGLISH

TRADITION,

It is only the eye of imagination that can conjure up the memory of the pilodup cloud of sail that made the ship ot the line one of the fairest things man ever made. The visitor to Portsmouth dockyard will have ample opportunity for observing the many terrible and wonderful ways in which modern science and modern invention have been applied to the evolution of the most efficient methods of waging war at sea Ho will descend into the mysterious bowels or submarines. He will climb to the conning towers of 30,000-ton battleships. He will see guns with an effective range of something like 30 miles, controlled by hydraulic 'machinery which enables their immense weight of metal to be raised or depressed by a mere finger touch. Ho will see torpedoes,.mines, aircraft —every conceivable engine of offence and defence that the mind of man through the ages has been able to achieve. And, final y (writes Cicely Fox feiuith in the .Daily Sketch), ho will go on to where nes in a little old graving dock little old wooden-sided vessel painted the distinctivo black and yellow of the (loots that sailed with Nelson. And, first of all, perhaps, he will marvel at her smallness -—she measures roughly some 200 ft from etcra to stern —before passing on througu the carved and pillared entry port to the narrow spaces where a tall man can barely stand upright, in which 800 men once lived, and slept, and yarned, and “ made and mended.” and fought, ami sometimes died, beside their guns-. And he will stand on her lower deck and fancy he smells the reek of smoke and the acrid tang of powder, and sees the half-naked gunners splashed with sweat and blood; and seem to catch through the battle smoke a glimpse of some opponent s gashed and splintered side, her yawning gun ports all but silent, a raffle of tattered canvas and trailing rigging showing that the deadly chain shot has done its work well. And he will go down to the cockpit and see the place where, under the dim glimmer of the lanterns, amid the stink of bilge and blood, and the cries and groans of the wounded and dying, that vivid and flame-like spirit which was Nelson quitted its frail earthly tenement in the very moment of victory. And ne will see the cabin where, on that fateful morning of October 21, he wrote the noble prayer before battle which is among the greatest treasures of the race. What is it, the secret of the Victory? How comes it that this small, ancient ship has been able to retain for a century aud a-quarter so strong a hold upon the imagination of a people not commonly accounted prone to emotion or sentiment? Not assuredly, in the capacity of an engine of war Her whole armament in these days would be of no more use than a popgun. .She cannot fight; and this, by tile way, since the business of the Admiralty is with fighting ships and not with those, whatever their history, whatever their associations, which arc past work, is the reason why the task of saving the Victory for the nation and restoring her as far as possible to her Trafalgar appearance has been undertaken by the Society for Nautical Jtescarch. She cannot oven, in a manner of speaking, float. She was, be it remembered, a fairly old ship—she had seen 40 years ’service — before Trafalgar. Afloat her days were numbered. Ashore, and earefuly watched and tended, as she will now be, her old ribs will hang together for many years to come. No —it is something far deeper than strength and finer than beauty which makes this old hull as much a place of pilgrimage for the British race as the Abbey or St. Paul's or tee Cenotaph. It is not the memory of Trafalgar: that, for all its glory, is a tale that is told. It is not even the .splendid and undying fame of Nelson himself. It is the tiling of which Nelson was, in a sense, only a symbol and an embodiment—that indefinable spiritual clement which stands above and beyond ‘' reeking lube and iron shard." Duty, service, sacrifice— a !l that is good and fine and worth having in what we call patriotism; in a word, tradition—the soul of a people. That is why the average man's iniiu-.vsion will bo entirely right—as somehow, to (he confusion of superior __ persons, average men's impressions so often arc.

•French girls arc said to be the best dress mannequins, because they are born coquettes and .study themselves and adopt poses from their Jirddhood.