Thus the Cæsars and their fortunes put out to sea with their subs and
their sad-eyed engineers, and their long-suffering signallers--I do
not even know the technical name of the sin which causes a man to be
born a destroyer-signaller in this life--and the little yellow shells
stuck all about where they can be easiest reached. The rest of their
acts is written for the information of the proper authorities. It
reads like a page of Todhunter. But the masters of merchant-ships
could tell more of eyeless shapes, barely outlined on the foam of
their own arrest, who shout orders through the thick gloom alongside.
The strayed and anxious neutral knows them when their searchlights pin
him across the deep, or their syrens answer the last yelp of his as
steam goes out of his torpedoed boilers. They stand by to catch and
soothe him in his pyjamas at the gangway, collect his scattered
lifeboats, and see a warm drink into him before they turn to hunt the
slayer. The drifters, punching and reeling up and down their ten-mile
line of traps; the outer trawlers, drawing the very teeth of Death
with water-sodden fingers, are grateful for their low, guarded
signals; and when the Zeppelin's revealing star-shell cracks darkness
open above him, the answering crack of the invisible destroyers' guns
comforts the busy mine-layers. Big cruisers talk to them, too; and,
what is more, they talk back to the cruisers. Sometimes they draw
fire--pinkish spurts of light--a long way off, where Fritz is trying
to coax them over a mine-field he has just laid; or they steal on
Fritz in the midst of his job, and the horizon rings with barking,
which the inevitable neutral who saw it all reports as "a heavy fleet
action in the North Sea." The sea after dark can be as alive as the
woods of summer nights. Everything is exactly where you don't expect
it, and the shyest creatures are the farthest away from their holes.
Things boom overhead like bitterns, or scutter alongside like hares,
or arise dripping and hissing from below like otters. It is the