tural base in
Portsmouth dockyard to act as the depot ship and training establishment
for a large section of this new force. Not all the officers and men of
the auxiliary fleet were, however, destined to pass across its decks.
This vessel was reserved for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, from
which a very considerable proportion of the entire personnel of the new
fleet was drawn. Nor was H.M.S. _Hermione_ the first depot ship of the
war-time R.N.V.R. at Southampton, for the Admiralty yacht _Resource II._
had been used for the first few drafts, but was unfortunately burned to
the water's edge. There were also other vessels and establishments at
Portsmouth, Devonport and Chatham. These were, however, mainly for the
reception and brief training of the more experienced Merchant Service
officers, entered in the Royal Naval Reserve for the duration of the
war, and for the surgeons and accountants.

The men of the new force were mostly trained in the naval barracks and
depot ships situated at the big naval centres, such as Portsmouth and
Chatham. After a few weeks all these establishments were drafting, in a
constant stream, the trained human element to the vessels awaiting full
complements at the different war bases, or being constructed in the
hundreds of shipyards of the Empire.

About H.M.S. _Hermione_, which has been selected as being representative
of the training depots of a large section of the auxiliary service,
little need be said, beyond the fact that she was commanded, first, by a
distinguished officer from the Dardanelles, and subsequently by an
equally capable officer, who, by the irony of fate, had in pre-war times
been a member of the British Naval Mission to the Turkish navy--both of
them men whose experience and unfailing tact contributed largely to the
success of the thousands of embryo officers trained under their command.

The ship herself was a rambling old cruiser, but very little of the
actual training was carried out on board. Spacious buildings on the
quayside provided the training grounds for gunnery, drill, signalling,
engineering and all the complicated curricula, of which more anon.
Lying in the still waters of the dock, alongside the comparatively big
grey cruiser, were the trim little hulls of a numerous flotilla of
20-knot motor launches, newly arrived from Canada, with wicked-looking
13-pounder high-angle guns, stumpy torpedo-boat masts and brand-new
White Ensigns and brass-bound decks. Th