oop, the same hanging
from a fore-and-aft taut steel line about seven feet above deck, and
when her stern rises he lifts his feet and shoots and fetches up
Bam!--up against the fo'c's'le break. He is forward and wants to go
aft--he hooks onto the loop, waits for her bow to rise, lets himself go
and there he is--back to her skid deck.

That sounds like rough work. Sometimes it gets rougher than that, and
then you hear of the wireless operator who was held in his radio shack
for forty hours. He got pretty hungry, but he preferred the hunger to
coming out and being washed overboard.

But let a machinist's mate tell you in his own way of the night he was
standing a fire-room watch--this with all due respect to the chart-house
bulkhead, the trolley line, the buckling decks, and the radio operator
who was confined--this night he was on watch in the fire-room. Was it
rough? He thought so. When he looked down at his feet, there were the
fire-room deck-plates folding in and out like a concertina.

Destroyer crews do not loaf overmuch around deck. They can't. They live
below decks mostly, strapped in when it is rough to a stretch of canvas
laced to four pieces of iron pipe, set on an angle down against the
ship's sides, and called a bunk. Even strapped in so they are sometimes,
when she has a good streak on, hove out into the passageways. It was a
young doctor of the flotilla who said that, except for their broken arms
and legs, his ship's crew were disgustingly healthy.

Our officers over there volunteer for this service, and for every one
who went, there were a dozen who wanted to go. And there is a lot of
difference between men who go to a duty because they are ordered to go,
and men who go because they want to go. These officers and men--there is
no beating them, except by blowing them off the face of the waters. And
even then they are not always beaten. One of our destroyers was cut down
one night by collision. (With so many ships being crowded into a small
steaming area, collisions are sure to happen.) All hands had to take to
the rafts in a hurry. It was about two in the morning, one of those
summer nights in the North when the light comes early. They watched her
going under. Her deck settled level with the sea, and as it did so a
young irrepressible one sang out: "What do you say, fellows, to having a
race around the old girl before she flops under?" Away they started,
four or five gangs of them, paddling their life ra