"We warn from disaster the mercantile master
Who takes in high dudgeon our life-saving rôle,
For every one's grousing at docking and dowsing
The marks and the lights on the North Sea Patrol."

[Twelve verses omitted.]

So swept but surviving, half drowned but still driving,
I watched her head out through the swell off the shoal,
And I heard her propellers roar: "Write to poor fellers
Who run such a Hell as the North Sea Patrol!"




PATROLS

II


The great basins were crammed with craft of kinds never known before
on any Navy List. Some were as they were born, others had been
converted, and a multitude have been designed for special cases. The
Navy prepares against all contingencies by land, sea, and air. It was
a relief to meet a batch of comprehensible destroyers and to drop
again into the little mouse-trap ward-rooms, which are as
large-hearted as all Our oceans. The men one used to know as
destroyer-lieutenants ("born stealing") are serious Commanders and
Captains to-day, but their sons, Lieutenants in command and