snatching an hour's sleep when and where they can. That sleep-abstinence
of the Navy--sleep, controlled, measured out, reduced to a bare minimum,
among thousands of men, that we on shore may sleep our fill--look at the
signs of it, in the eyes both of these officers, and of the sailors
crowding the "liberty" boats, which are just bringing them back from their
short two hours' leave on shore!

Another gathering, in the Captain's room, for tea. The talk turns on a
certain popular play dealing with naval life, and a Commander describes
how the manuscript of it had been brought to him, and how he had revelled
in the cutting out of all the sentimentalisms. Two men in the
play--friends--going into action--shake hands with each other "with tears
in their eyes." A shout of derisive laughter goes up from the tea-table.
But they admit "talking shop" off duty. "That's the difference between us
and the Army." And what shop it is! I listen to two young officers, both
commanding destroyers, describing--one, his adventures in dirty weather
the night before, on patrol duty. "My hat, I thought one moment the ship
was on the rocks! You couldn't see a yard for the snow--and the
sea--_beastly_!" The other had been on one of Admiral Hood's monitors,
when they suddenly loomed out of the mist on the Belgian coast, and the
German army marching along the coast road to Dunkirk and Calais marched no
more, but lay in broken fragments behind the dunes, or any shelter
available, till the flooding of the dikes farther south completed the
hopeless defeat which Admiral Hood's guns had begun.

Then the talk ranges round the blockade, the difficulties and dangers of
patrol work, the complaints of neutrals. "America should understand us.
Their blockade hit us hard enough in the Civil War. And we are fighting
for their ideals no less than our own. When has our naval supremacy ever
hurt them? Mayn't they be glad of it some day? What about a fellow called