DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 3277, 3 January 1917, Page 23

DESTROYERS AT JUTLAND.

"CARRYING OX." By RUDYAED KIPLLN'G. Copyright, 1916, by Kudyard Kipling, in the U.S.A. Itights of republication secured by the Otago Daily Times. IV. What mystery is there like the mystery of the other< man's job—or what world so cut ofii as that which he enters when ho goes to it? The eminent surgeon is altogether such a one as ourselves, even till his hand falls on the knob of the theatre door. Alter that, in the siienee, among the ether fumes, no man except his acolytes, and they won't tell, has ever seen his face. So with the unconsidered curate. Yet, before the war, he had more experience of the business and detail of death than any of the people who contemned him. His face also, as he stands his bedside watches—that countenance with which he shall justify himself to his Maker —none have ever looked upon. Even the ditcher is a priest of mysteries at the high moment when he lays out in his mind his levels and the fall of water that he alone can draw off clearly. But catch any of these men five minutes after they have left their altars, and you will find the doors are shut. Chance sent me almost immediately after the Jutland fight a lieutenant of one of the destroyers engaged. Among other matters I asked him if there was any particular noise. "Well, I haven't been in the trenches, of course," he replied; "but I don't think there could have been much more noise than there was." This bears out a report of a destroyer who could not be certain whether an enemy battleship had blown up or not, saying that in that particular corner it would have been impossible to identify anything less than the explosion of a whole magazine. "It wasn't exactly noise,'' he reflected. " Noise is what you take in from outside. This was inside you. It seemed to lift you right out of everything." "And how did the light affect one?" I asked, trying to work out a theory that noise and light produced beyond known endurance form an unknown ansssthctic and stimulant, comparable to, but infinitely more potent than, the soothing effect of the smokc-pall of ancient battles. "The lights were rather curious," was the answer. I don't know that one noticed searchlights particularly, unless they meant business; but when a lot of big guns loosed off together, the whole sea was lit up and you could see our destroyers running about like cockroaches on a tin soup plate." "Then is black the best colour for our destroyers? Some commanders seem to think we ought to use grey." " Blessed if I know," said young Dante. " Everything shows black in that light. Then it all goes out again with a bang. Trying for the eyes if you arc spotting." " And how did the dogs take it?" I pursued. There are several destroyers more or less owned by pet dogs, who start life as the chance-found property of a stoker, and end in supreme command of the bridge. " Most of 'em don't like it a bit. They went below one time, and wanted to bo loved. They knew it wasn't ordinary practice "

" What did Arabella do?" I had heard a good deal of Arabella. " Oh, Arabella's quite different. Her job has always been to look after her master's pyjamas—folded up at the head of the bunk, you know. She found pretty soon the bridge was no place for a lady, so she hopped downstairs and got in. You know how she makes three little jumps to it—first, on to the chair, then on the flaptable, and then up on the pillow- When the show was over, there she- was, as usual." "Was sho glad to see her master?" " Ra-ather. Arabella was the bold, gay lady-dog then !" Now, Arabella is between 9 and lljin long. "Does the Hun run to pets at all?" " I shouldn't, say so. Ile'e an unsympathetic felon—the Hun. But ho might cherish a dachshund or so. We never picked up any ships' pets off him, and I'm sure wo should if there had been." That I believed as implicitly as the tale of a destroyer attack some months ago, the object of which was to flush Zeppelins. It succeeded, for the flotilla was attacked by several. Right in the middle of the flurry a destroyer asked permission to stop and lower dinghy to pick up ship's dog, which had fallen overboard. Permission was granted, and the dog was duly rescued. "Lord knows what the Huns made of it." said my informant. He was rumblng round, dropping bombs; and the dinghy was digging out for all she was worth, and the Dog-Fiend was swimming for Dunkirk. It must have looked rather mad from above. But thev saved the Dog-Fiend, and then everybody swore he was a German spy in disguise." JUST A FIGHT, "And about this Jutland fight?" I hinted, not for the first time. " Oh, that was just a fight- There was more of it than any other light, I suppose, but I expect all modern naval actions must be pretty much the same." " But what docs one do—how does one feel?" I insisted, though I knew it was hopeless. " Ono does one's job. Things are happening all the time. A man may be right under our nose one minute— 6erving a gun

or something—and the next minute he isn't there." "And one notices that at tho time?" " Yes. But there's no timo to keep on noticing it. You've got to carry on somehow or other, or your show stops. I you what one does notice, though. If one goes below for anything, or has to pass through a flat somewhere, and one sees tho old wardroom .clock ticking, or a photograph pinned up, or anything of that sort, one notices that. Oh, yes, and there was another thing—tho way a ship seemed to blow up if you wore far off her. You'd see a glare, then a blaze, and then tho smoke—miles high, lifting quite, slowly. r i hen you'd got tho row and the jar of it—just liko bumping over submarines. Then, a long while after, p'raps, you run through a regular rain of bits of burnt paper coming down on the decks—like showers, of volcanic ash, you know." And the Hun's gunnery?"

"That was various. Sometimes they began quite well, and went to pieces after they'd been strafed a little; but sometimes they picked up again. There was one Hun-boat that got no end of a hammering, and it seemed to do her gunnery good. She improved tremendously till wo sank her. I expect we'd knocked out some scientific Hun in the control:-, and he'd been succeeded by a man who knew how." "It used to be 'Fritz' last year when they spoke of tho enemy. Now it is Hun, or, as I have hoard, 'Yahun,' being a superlative of Yahoo.' In the Napoleonic wars wo called the Frenchmen too many names for any one of them to endure; but this is the age of standardisation. "And what about our lower deck?" I continued.

"They? Oh, tfcey carried on as usual. It takes a lot to impress the lower deck when they're busy. "And he mentioned several little things that confirmed this. T ne y na d a great deal to do, and they did it serenely recause they had been trained to carry on under all conditions without panicking. What they did in tho way of running repairs was even more wonderful, if that be possible, than their normal routine. Tho lower deck nowadays is full of strange fish with unlooked for accomplishments, as in tho recorded case of two simple seamen of a destroyer who, when need was sorest, came to the front as trained experts in firstaid.

"And now —what about the actual Hun losses at Jutland?" I ventured. "You'vo seen th© list, haven't you?" "Yes, but it occurred to mo —fh.it they might have been a shade imder-esohnatod, and I thought, perhaps " A perfectly plain, asbestos fire-curtain descended in front of the already locked door. It was none of hia business to dispute the drive. If (hero were any discrepancies between estimate and results, one might be sure that the enemy knew about them, which was the chief thins that matters. It was. said he, Joss that the light was so bad at the hour of the last round-up, when our main fleet had come down from the north and shovelled the Hun round on his tracks. Per contra, had it been any other kind of weather the odds were the Hun would not have ventured so far. A& it was, the Hun's fleet had come out and gone back again, none the better for air and exercise. We must 'be _ thankful for what we had managed to pick up_. But, talking of picking up. there was an instance of almost unparalleled Joss which had stuck in his memory. A soldier-man, related to one of the officers in one of our ships,that was put down, had got five days' leave from the trenches, which he spent with his relative aboard, and thus dropped in for the whole performance. He had been employed in helping to snot, and had lived up a mast till the ship sank, when he stepped off into the water and swam about til! he was fished out and put ashore. By that time, the tale goes, his engine-room-dried khaki had shrunk halfway up his legs and arms, in which costume ho reported himself at the War Office, and pleaded for one little day s extension of leave to make himself decent. "Not a bit of it," said the War Office. "If you choso to spend your leave playing with sailormen and getting wet all over, that's your concern. You will return to duty by to-nieht's boat." (This may be a libel on the W. 0., but it sounds very like them.) "And ho had to," said the boy; "but I expect ho spent the next week at headquarters telling generals all about the fight." BEADY AGAIN. " And, of course,, the Admiralty gave you all lots of leave?" " Us? Yea, heaps. We had nothing to do except clean down and oil up and ready to go to sea again in a few hours." That little fact was brought out at the end of almost every destroyer's report. •' Having returned to base at such and such a time, I took in oil, etc., and reported ready for sea at o'clock." When you think of the amount of work a ship needs even after peace manoeuvres, you can realise what had to be done on the heels of an action. And, as there is nothing like housework for t-e troubled soul of a woman, so a gene-nl clean-up is good for sailors. I had this from a petty officer who had also passed through deep waters. "If you've seen your best friend go from alongside you, and your own officer, and your own boat's crew with him. and things of that kind, a man's best comfort is small variegated jobs which he is damned for continuous." Presently my friend of the destroyer went back to his stark, desolate life, where feelings do not count, and the fact of his being cold, wet. seasick, sleepless, or dog-tired had no bearing whatever in his business, which was to turn out at any hour in any weather and do or endure, decently, according to ritual, what that hour and that weather demanded. It is hard to reach the kernel of navy minds. The unbribable seas and mechanisms they work on and through, have'given them the' simplicity of elements and machines. The habit of "dealing with swift accident; a life of closest and strictest association with their own caste, as well as contact with nil kinds of men all earth over have added an immense cunning to those qualities; and that thev are from early youth cut out of all feelings that may come between them and their"ends makes them more incomprehensible than Jesuits, even to their own people. What, then, must they be to the

•enemy* , , , Hero is a Service, which prowls forth and achieves, at the lowest, something of a victory. How far-reactfing a one only the war's end will reveal. It returns in gloomy silence, broken by the occasional hoot of the longshore loafer, after issuing a bulletin whic.li. though it may enlighten the professional mind, noes not exhilarate the layman. Meantime tho enemy triumphs, wire-, lessly, far and wide. A few frigid and perfunctory seeming contradictions are put forward against his. resounding claims; a naval

expert or two is heard talking "off":, the rest; J 3 silenco Anon, tho enemy, aft it a prodigious amount of explanation which not even tho neutrals seem to take any interest in, revises his claims and, very modestly, onlargos his loss* .*. Still no sign. Aitci weeks there a document giving oui version of the affair, which is as colourless, detached, and scrupulously impartial as thfl findings of a prize court. It opines that tinlist of enemy losses which it submit, "give! thc_ minimum in regard to numbers, though it is possibly not entirely accurate in re< gard to the particular class of vessel, ospoci. ally those that were sunk during the iiiglrj attacks." Here tho matter rest* and re* mains—just like our blockade. There is af insolence about it all that makes one- gasp