Pincher Martin, O.D.: A Story of the Inner Life of the Royal Navy

Now Martin, small and puny though he was, was fleet of foot and very tricky with his feet, but he was far too modest to let anybody know it. He always watched the matches, however, and took an intelligent interest in the games, and eventually, by dint of being present on many occasions, found himself installed as a sort of honorary member of the team in the shape of their recognised touch-judge. He was even permitted to appear in the photograph which was taken soon after the ship arrived at Portland. He was in the back row, it is true, and wore his seaman's clothes instead of a highly coloured shirt, blue shorts, stockings, and football boots. But he carried a small hand-flag as his insignia of office, and considered himself no small beer in consequence. It was an honour to be associated with the team in any way; and as most of the officers, and practically the whole of the ship's company who happened to be ashore, made a point of attending the matches, Martin, running about with his flag, felt he was a – if not the – centre of attraction. At any rate, he was quite a personage, and talked about the game to the other ordinary seamen and boys with an air of great authority.

The scenes of excitement during some of the matches baffled description. 'Play up, Yaller-bellies!' two hundred of the Belligerent's men would shout in unison. The yellow referred to the canary-coloured shirts worn by their team, while the other rather inelegant word was the abbreviated name of the ship.

'Come on, the Cockneys!' or 'the Duffos!' would come the answering roar from the partisans of the other team, according to whether their ship hailed from Chatham or Devonport. 'Down wi' the Pompeyites!'

For minutes at a time the repartee bandied to and fro was so vociferous that the whistle was well-nigh inaudible; but the referee was used to it. He had an unenviable time in other ways, poor man! for whatever decision he gave was quite certain to be wrong from the point of view of fully half the spectators, in spite of the fact that he was a strictly neutral man from some other ship. 'Foul!' somebody would bellow, as the whistle blew for a free kick. 'Garn! That ain't no foul!' was hurled back from the men of the ship against which the penalty had been given. 'Play the game! Play the game, carn't you?' 'Goal! Well shot! Good old Yaller-bellies!' would come a roar, accompanied by a shower of caps in the air, as the ball flew past the white posts into the net. 'That's the style! Knock 'em end-ways!' 'Offside! Offside!' came louder yells from the other side. 'Where's the referee? What's 'e thinkin' of?' And so it went on.

But the referee, used to the ways of seamen, merely smiled, and paid no attention whatever to the ribald remarks hurled at his head, personal as some of them were. He was proof against such attacks, and his decisions were always fair.

Occasionally there were stormy scenes at the end of the matches; for when a favourite team had lost, their adherents were sometimes anxious to take on the partisans of the other side with their fists to discover which really was the better ship. More than once men returned on board with black eyes and swollen noses; but actual bloodshed was rare, though feeling always ran high. More often than not, victors and vanquished alike repaired to the canteen, and absorbed malt liquor at each other's expense, the former to celebrate the victory and the latter to drown their sorrow. They were very keen on the result of the league matches. The canteen did a roaring trade.

At one of the most important matches a member of the Belligerent's eleven happened to be absent at the time the game was due to start, and Lieutenant Boyle, who captained the team, was at his wits' end to find a suitable substitute. 'Have any of you men played this game?' he asked, going up to a group of seamen belonging to the Belligerent who had come to watch. 'Parkins hasn't turned up. We want a forward badly.'

Pincher, seizing the opportunity, stepped forward before any one else had a chance of answering. 'I've played at 'ome, sir,' he said, reddening at his own temerity. 'I used to be on the right wing.'

Boyle seemed rather surprised. 'You!' he said. 'Can you run? D' you know how to dribble and shoot?'

'Yessir.'

The officer looked at him for a moment without replying. He seemed rather doubtful.

''E's orl right, sir,' chipped in Billings, who happened to be present. ''E's pretty nippy on 'is feet. I've seen 'im kickin' the ball abart.'

The lieutenant looked up with a laugh. 'All right, Billings; we'll take him on your recommendation. – Martin, rush across to the pavilion and borrow some gear. Hurry up about it; we're late already.'

Pincher, overjoyed and very proud of himself, flew off like the wind, and presently reappeared clad in full regalia, yellow shirt and all. It was his first really important match; but he felt he was on his mettle, and played well, almost brilliantly. At any rate, he shot two goals; whereat the 'Belligerents' howled themselves hoarse, raised cheers for 'young Pincher,' and wished to treat him with much beer at the end of the game. It was the first time in his life he had ever received adulation, and he was a proud man. His play had undoubtedly helped to win the match.

He was prouder still when Boyle sought him out afterwards. 'You played excellently, Martin,' he said. 'Why on earth didn't you let us know you played?'

'Didn't like to, sir.'

The officer laughed. 'I wish you men wouldn't be quite so modest,' he remarked. 'How d' you expect us to raise a decent team if you all hide your lights under bushels? You're the very man we've been looking for.'

'I'm sorry, sir,' said Martin sheepishly. 'I didn't know as 'ow I wus wanted.'

'We didn't know you were a player. However, now we've got you, you will remain in the team; so look out you keep yourself in decent training. A pint of beer after each game, and no more, mind. If you come to my cabin this evening I'll give you your jersey and other gear.' The lieutenant strolled off to change.

Martin could have jumped for joy. He was a full-fledged 'Yellow-belly' at last, and would appear before the whole ship's company in all the glory of a canary-yellow shirt with a large blue 'B' on the left breast. It was one of the things in this world he had been longing for. He was no longer a mere excrescence on the face of the earth – a poor, puny Pincher who was everybody's whipping-boy. On the contrary, he was a very proud Pincher, for at last he had come into his own. The Belligerent had some use for him, after all.

CHAPTER V

THE OFFICERS

The Belligerent's captain, John Horatio Spencer, D.S.O., was a fine type of the modern British naval officer, and a thorough seaman, who had risen in his profession through sheer merit and force of character. He had been lucky, it is true, for as a young lieutenant he had seen much active service in West Africa, had been severely wounded, was mentioned in despatches for 'great gallantry and resource,' and had received the Distinguished Service Order. In 1900, again, as the senior lieutenant of a second-class cruiser on the Cape of Good Hope station, he was landed with the naval guns for the relief of Ladysmith. He again did excellent service, was promoted to commander in 1901, to captain seven years later, and 1914 found him commanding a first-class battleship at the comparatively early age of forty-three.

In appearance he was a big, thick-set man, nearly six feet tall, and broad in proportion. He had a red, clean-shaven face, a pair of penetrating blue eyes which seemed to read one's innermost thoughts, and dark hair slightly shot with gray over the temples.

Every ship he had ever commanded, from a destroyer upwards, had been a happy one. His officers loved him as a friend and admired him as a superior, and 'Our John,' as they affectionately called him, spent far more time in their company than he did in the fastnesses of his own cabin. He hated the solitude of life in his own apartments in the after-end of the ship, and, when he had no guests of his own, frequently had meals in the wardroom as an honorary member, and played bridge and spun yarns in the smoking-room. He had the happy knack of being friendly with every one with whom he came in contact, and invariably treated his officers as equals when he was off duty.

On deck, of course, it was a different matter, for there he was very much their commanding officer, and they his subordinates; and, as Tickle, the junior watch-keeper, once put it, 'the owner10 was the whitest and the straightest man on God's earth; but Heaven help you if you make a fool of yourself on deck!'

Captain Spencer did bite sometimes, and bite hard; but the culprit generally deserved all he got, and bore no grudge whatsoever. More often than not he would be discovered the same evening in the smoking-room having a sherry-and-bitters with 'the old man,' just to show there was no ill-feeling on either side.

On the mess-deck the captain was revered in rather a different way, for the men, while admiring him, regarded him with a certain amount of awe. Some of the younger and more timid ordinary seamen and boys, indeed, looked upon him as a sort of awful deity, an ogre almost, who sat in his cabin all day long inventing new schemes for their eternal damnation. They were frightened of him, and, on the rare occasions when they did catch sight of his four gold stripes on deck, felt rather inclined to run away and hide their faces. It was foolish of them, for a kinder-hearted man than the skipper it would be impossible to imagine.

But the men saw comparatively little of him, and had few opportunities of discovering his true character. He appeared on deck for 'divisions' every morning; walked round on Sundays criticising their clothes, the length of their hair, and the cleanliness of the ship; was always on the bridge at sea; and punished them when they misbehaved themselves. They realised he was just, and justice is what the bluejacket most admires; but they were not aware that he took a deep interest in them and their affairs, and that he knew everything that went on on board. Neither did they perceive that he frequently went to a great deal of trouble to stretch points in their favour in the way of leave and other privileges.

'Our John' hated advertisement in any form; and this, perhaps, was why the men never really understood his true kindliness of heart. For instance, when he subscribed five pounds towards a fund for the benefit of the widow of one of his men who had died, or two pounds towards the ship's concert party, he gave the money anonymously. When he granted the men an extra forty-eight hours' leave on his own responsibility, and because he considered they had earned it by their good behaviour, he never told them so.

So, from the lower-deck point of view, Captain Spencer was justly admired and greatly feared; but there was not a man on board who had not the fullest confidence in him and his judgment, or who would not cheerfully have followed him to the very gates of hell if he had asked them. Neither was there a more efficient or a happier ship than the Belligerent. Her officers and men knew it, and gloried in the fact.

But no small credit for this excellent state of affairs was due to the commander and other officers. The former, the Honourable Algernon D'Arcy Travers, was the direct antithesis of the captain in appearance. He was tall and very thin, but was a pleasant messmate with a very pronounced sense of humour, and on occasions behaved with all the boisterous bonhomie of a junior sub-lieutenant. His excessive leanness did not worry him in the least, though he did once say that he wished his 'hinge' were a little better padded and the wardroom chairs rather softer. It was a matter of some import to his wife, though, for that lady sent him bottles of malt extract to thicken the flesh on his bones. This nutritive compound, however, was generally handed over to his bluejacket messenger, who liked the sweet taste of it; and that youth, already chubby and well-favoured, was gradually assuming the proportions of a young elephant. The commander found that being thin was an advantage in some ways; and on riotous guest nights, when he made as much noise as anybody present, it certainly permitted him to scramble through the square opening in the back of one of the wardroom chairs without much difficulty.

It was a feat few of his messmates could perform. The engineer-commander, George Piston, a well-covered officer, had tried it on one occasion, and had stuck half-way through. His messmates, headed by the commander himself, cheered him on with howls of merriment; but the victim was laughing so much that he seemed to have swelled. He could not budge one way or the other, and there was every prospect of his having to go through life with a chair securely fastened round his portly middle. They took off his garments one by one; but it was no use. They used vaseline and oil as lubricants, and endeavoured to tuck the folds of flesh through the narrow opening, but without avail.

'For heaven's sake send for a saw!' spluttered the gasping officer, relapsing uncomfortably on the sofa and beginning to feel rather alarmed. 'I can hardly breathe. Give me a whisky-and-soda, some one, or I shall burst!'

The saw arrived in due course, and the chair was removed with some damage to itself. The gallant officer never attempted the feat again.

The commander, an ex-torpedo specialist, was a good officer at his work, and the Belligerent always looked as clean and as smart as a new pin. Her organisation, too, was as perfect as it could be. The ship's company were very fond of 'the Bloke,' as they called him; and when men did misbehave themselves he generally made the punishment fit the crime. When two ordinary seamen, Barter and Hitchcock, began to give trouble, for instance, he hit upon rather an original method of dealing with them. He provided both of them with an ordinary singlestick and a face-mask, but no body-pads, and then promised them one penny each for every visible wale inflicted on the anatomy of the other. The instigator imagined that he would have to shell out a shilling at the most; but after a bout lasting for a fierce fifteen minutes, examination in the bathroom at the hands of a ship's corporal showed that Barter had earned one shilling and eightpence, and Hitchcock two and a penny. They were never obstreperous again, and the ship's company, instead of offering them sympathy, laughed immoderately.

The commander, like other naval officers, had his bad moments, and sometimes the watch-keepers found it advisable to steer clear of him before breakfast. But even if an explosion did occur no bones were ever broken, for they all knew he said a great deal more than he meant. After breakfast and a pipe he was amiability itself, provided nothing went wrong.

Chase, the senior lieutenant-commander and gunnery officer, has already been described; and the next in seniority was Vernon Hatherley, the lieutenant-commander (T.). He was something of an exquisite. He took a great pride in his personal appearance, was reported to wear silk slumber-wear, and kept a store of cosmetics and unguents in his cabin for the anointing of his face and hair. His messmates knew this, and, headed by No. 1, sometimes shampooed him with whisky-and-soda after dinner. But Torps, as they called him, was an excellent fellow, and took the ragging all in good part. Moreover, he generally succeeded in getting his own back by discovering something wrong with the electric lights in his tormentors' cabins at times when they most wanted to use them. He was an x-chaser, in that he had done remarkably well in all his different examinations; but besides being an expert theorist, he was an officer who knew the practical side of his business from A to Z.

The navigator, Christopher Colomb, had just married a young and pretty wife, and did not spend more time on board than he could possibly help. As a consequence, his messmates saw comparatively little of him, unless the Belligerent was cruising, and Mrs Colomb could not follow her husband. The captain occasionally succeeded in getting him to play golf in the afternoons; but Colomb preferred his wife's society to that of any one else. When he was on board in the evenings he shut himself in his cabin, and spent the time writing a learned treatise on Magnetic Influences at Sea. The book is still being written.

Peter Wooten, the next senior non-specialist officer of the military branch, was doing a two-year spell in a battleship, after having been in command of destroyers and gunboats for the past six years. He hated the drudgery of big-ship life, where he acted as the commander's understudy on the upper deck, had charge of the midshipmen and their instruction, arranged the ordinary seamen's training classes, worked the derrick for hoisting in and out boats, and generally acted as a sort of 'odd job' man. The life was fairly comfortable, it is true; but he much preferred the joys of commanding his own small ship to being a comparative nobody in a vessel the size of the Belligerent. He was a burly, deep-chested man, with fair, curly hair, tanned face, and a pair of clear, humorous blue eyes. He was fresh from China, where he had commanded a tiny river gunboat up the Yang-tse-kiang; and there, miles up the great river, far away from any admiral, and completely 'on his own,' he had made history in a small way. He was a great character, and his stories of the Chinese revolution, when he could be induced to tell them, were sometimes amusing and always interesting. (He was the commanding officer of Martin's destroyer when that ordinary seaman joined the 'black navy' soon after the outbreak of the present war, so perhaps we may be pardoned for allowing him to spin one of his yarns. It has the advantage of being true.)

'It was quite a pretty little show,' he said one evening in the smoking-room after dinner, when somebody had egged him on to talk after a second glass of port. 'Have any of you fellows ever heard of a place called Kiang-fu, up the Yang-tse? You might know it, No. 1; you're an old China bird.'

Chase shook his head. 'Sorry I don't, Peter. But let's have the yarn, all the same.'

Wooten lit his pipe. 'Kiang-fu,' he started, 'is one of their walled towns on the banks of the river. It's a beastly place, full of stinks and bugs and abominations generally; and the only white people there are the consul and his wife, a couple of missionaries, and two merchants. Well, one morning my old Kingfisher was lying about twenty miles downstream, and a Chinaman from the consulate at Kiang-fu arrived in a sampan with a note from the consul to say that five thousand rebels had arrived before the place, and that there was going to be some scrapping. There were about a thousand Imperial troops inside the town, Johnson the consul said, and he was in a bit of a funk as to what would happen when the rebels took the place. They'd have butchered every one, of course, Europeans included. My orders were to protect British interests, but not to fight, so I upped killick11 and steamed for Kiang-fu for all I was worth. We got about six and an onion12 out of the old bus, I remember, and reached there about noon.' He paused and sucked thoughtfully at his pipe.

'And what happened then?' queried some one.

'I found the bally battle in full swing,' Wooten went on. 'Guy Fawkes Day wasn't in it, and both sides were blazing away for all they were worth, and making a hell of a row. However, they weren't doing much damage to each other. I anchored my hooker about a couple of hundred yards from the shore, where we could get a decent view of what went on, manned my two six-pounders and the Maxim, and hoisted an ensign and a large white flag – wardroom tablecloth it was – in a boat, and then went ashore to see Johnson. Things were pretty lively, and shells were bursting and bullets were whistling all over the place. The rebel attack was to come off that night, and as there could be only one end to it, I took Johnson and his missus, the two missionaries, the two shopkeepers, and Heaven alone knows how many Christian Chinese off to my ship. The upper deck was fairly packed with 'em. Then we sat down to watch the sport. One of the shopkeepers, I may say, was a Scotsman, and the other a Yank, and they wanted me to order the rebs. to shove off out of it and leave Kiang-fu alone. They had a lot of valuable stuff in their godowns13 waiting to be shipped down the river, and said the whole lot of it 'u'd be looted if the city fell.

'I cursed them for a couple of tizzy-snatchers,' he resumed, grinning at the recollection; 'I told 'em they ought to be jolly thankful to have got off with their lives; and asked 'em how the dooce I could dictate to five thousand ruddy cut-throats with Mauser rifles and Lord knows how many field guns – decent guns, too; none of your clap-trap rubbish. I had exactly thirty men all told, a broken-winded eighty-ton gun-boat, two six-pounders, and one Maxim. Pretty tall order, wasn't it? However, I was still yapping to 'em on deck when I heard a sort of phut, and a bally bullet buried itself in the deck about a foot off my leg. It came from the direction of the rebel trenches, about five hundred yards off, and some silly blighter had evidently eased off a rifle at us for the fun of the thing. I heard one or two more bullets come whistling overhead – damned bad shooting they made – so sent all the refugees over to the lee side of the deck out of harm's way. Then I trained my guns on the rebs., and hoisted all the ensigns I had. They knocked off firing then, so I got into the boat with the consul, the wardroom tablecloth, and the largest ensign I could find, and pulled ashore.' He paused.

'Had you any weapons with you?' somebody asked.

'Lord, no!' said Wooten. 'Doesn't do to let a Chinaman see you're frightened of him. I took a walking-stick, and Johnson had a white umbrella. I was in a dooce of a funk, though, and when we landed we found a whole bally company of soldiers waiting to receive us.'

'What! a guard of honour?' asked Chase.

'Don't you believe it. They had fixed bayonets and loaded rifles, and I felt rather nervous as to what was going to happen. You see, there wasn't another British ship within a hundred miles of us. However, I landed with the consul, and a Chinese officer with a drawn sword came forward to receive us. He wasn't a bad fellow, and talked quite decent English, with an American accent. I asked him what the dooce they meant by having the troops there as if they wanted to scupper us, and told him who the consul was, and that I was the C.O. of the man-of-war, and that, on behalf of his Britannic Majesty, we wished to see his General. He said the old bloke was having his afternoon caulk, and that they daren't wake him. I said he'd better roust the old josser out, and be damned smart about it. He hummed and hawed a bit over that, and then said that if we'd come along with him he'd take us to the headquarters, and see if we could have an interview. I wasn't going to kow-tow to any bally Chinaman, though, so I told him that if he didn't take steps to have the General brought to us in less than half-an-hour I'd raise hell's delight. It's no use being anything but dictatorial with Chinamen,' he went on to explain; 'and if you can bluff 'em into believing that you've got the whip-hand they generally knuckle under. We had some more talkee-talkee, and then he did go off with his men, and jolly glad I was to see the last of 'em. Twenty minutes later the General arrived. He was rather a fine-looking old boy, with no pigtail, and was dressed up in khaki and a sword. He had a couple of A.D.C.'s with him. He couldn't talk English, so I asked him through the consul what he meant by allowing his troops to fire on my ship, and said that I should have to report it, and so on. He said they hadn't done it. I said they had, and that if he came on board I'd jolly soon prove it. Well, after a lot of jawbation we got him into the boat, with the A.D.C.'s, took him off to the ship, and showed him the bullet-mark in the deck. He got in a bit of a funk then, so Johnson and I drew up a document in Chinese and English, in which he said he was sorry for what had occurred, and so on. It went on to say that he agreed to abandon the siege of Kiang-fu, as British interests were at stake, so we'd more or less cornered him. He signed like a lamb, wily old devil; but then we remembered that no document is valid in China unless it's stamped with the official seal of the man who signed it. We asked him where the seal was, but he hadn't got it on him. Johnson asked him where it was, and he said he'd got it in his old headquarters, about ten miles downstream. He volunteered to go and fetch it, but we weren't having any. The upshot of the whole affair was that we sent one of the A.D.C.'s ashore to order the siege to be stopped, and the rebels to retire, and took the General and the other A.D.C. down the river. Then we sent the A.D.C. ashore to get the seal, and had the document properly stamped. That's all, I think.'