Rhein_ with one
finger--can't you, Pills?"

The Young Doctor beamed with simple pride. "My sister's German
governess taught me when I was a kid," he explained. "We have it every
night--it's the only tune I know."

"The sideboard is to support the empty glasses of the bridge-players
after the Padre has put down one of his celebrated 'no-trumps'
hands--we had to keep the sideboard. The arm-chair is for Number One
to sit in and beat time while his funny party chip paint off the
bulkheads." The Gunnery Lieutenant looked round. "And so on, and so
on--oh, the gramophone? Bunje bu'st all the records except three, and
we're getting to know those rather well. But as you're a guest, old
thing, would you like 'Tipperary,' Tosti's 'Good-bye,' or 'A Little
Grey Home in the West'?"

The corporal of the ward-room servants interrupted these amenities with
the announcement that dinner was ready, and a general move was made to
the table.

Thereafter the conversation flowed evenly and generally. It was not
confined to war. The men who make war, either afloat or ashore, do not
talk about it over-much. There are others--even in this England of
ours--by tradition better qualified to do the talking, in that they see
most of the game. . . . On the whole, perhaps, more "shop" was
discussed than would have been the case in peace-time, but for the most
part it eddied round much the same subjects as Wardroom conversation
always does, with the Indiarubber Man's Puck-like humour and gay
mock-cynicism running through it like a whimsical pattern in an
otherwise conventional design.

War had been their trade in theory from earliest youth. They were all
on nodding terms with Death. Indeed, most of the men round the long
table had looked him between the eyes already, and the obituary pages
in the Navy List had been a reminder, month by month, of others who had
looked there too--and blinked, and closed their eyes--shipmates and
fleetmates and familiar friends.

War was the Real Thing, that was all. There was nothing about it to
obsess men's minds. You might say it was the manoeuvres of 19-- all
over again, with the chance of "bumping a mine" thrown in, and also the
glorious certainty of ultimately seeing a twelve-inch salvo pitch
exactly where the long years of preparation ordained that it should.

A submarine specialist, whom the war caught doing exile in a "big
ship," dominated the conversation for a while with lamentations that