It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty of
work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot help
wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the stick.
Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of the
R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't mean,
when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work such as
my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, nor my
friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying men, or
the officers of the watch. I mean _work_, hard, sweating, nasty
toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. Most ships of the
naval auxiliary are the same.

I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular fragment
of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other profession
have the officers responsible for the carrying out of the work to
toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, in fleet
auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the waste-pipe of
his regimental latrines. You do not expect the surgeon to
superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not expect the
navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not expect an
architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You do not
expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law courts
door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. Yet you
do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer
has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corresponding
precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, which are in
other professions relegated to the humblest and roughest of mankind.
I blame no one. It is tradition, a most terrible windmill at which
to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to set down once at least the