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
destroyer's business to find out what their business may be through
all the long night, and to help or hinder accordingly. Dawn sees them
pitch-poling insanely between head-seas, or hanging on to bridges that
sweep like scythes from one forlorn horizon to the other. A
homeward-bound submarine chooses this hour to rise, very
ostentatiously, and signals by hand to a lieutenant in command. (They
were the same term at Dartmouth, and same first ship.)

"What's he sayin'? Secure that gun, will you? 'Can't hear oneself
speak," The gun is a bit noisy on its mountings, but that isn't the
reason for the destroyer-lieutenant's short temper.

"'Says he's goin' down, sir," the signaller replies. What the
submarine had spelt out, and everybody knows it, was: "Cannot approve
of this extremely frightful weather. Am going to bye-bye."

"Well!" snaps the lieutenant to his signaller, "what are you grinning
at?" The submarine has hung on to ask if the destroyer will "kiss her
and whisper good-night." A breaking sea smacks her tower in the middle
of the insult. She closes like an oyster, but--just too late. _Habet!_
There must be a quarter of a ton of water somewhere down below, on its
way to her ticklish batteries.

"What a wag!" says the signaller, dreamily. "Well, 'e can't say 'e
didn't get 'is little kiss."

The lieutenant in command smiles. The sea is a beast, but a just
beast.

RACIAL UNTRUTHS

This is trivial enough, but what would you have? If Admirals will not
strike the proper attitudes, nor Lieutenants emit the appropriate
sentiments, one is forced back on the truth, which is that the men at
the heart of the great matters in our Empire are, mostly, of an even
simplicity. From the advertising point of view they are stupid, but
the breed has always been stupid in this department. It may be due,
as our