activity of searchlight and star-shell.
“Them’s our guns,” said one of the cocoa-drinkers. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve{63} of his coat, and stared ahead. It never seemed to occur to any of them that they might equally well be German guns.
{63}
“That’s right,” confirmed the sight-setter. “There’s guns going like that for ’undreds an’ ’undreds of miles. Right away up from the sea. Me brother’s there—somewhere....” For a moment they ruminated over a mental picture of the sight-setter’s brother, a mud-plastered stoical atom, somewhere along those hundreds of miles of wire and bayonets that hedged civilisation and posterity from the Unnamable. “Switzer{64}land to the sea,” said the speaker. He jerked the breech-lever absent-mindedly towards him, and closed it again with a little click.
{64}
“An’ then we takes on,” said a loading number. “Us an’ these ’ere.” He tapped the smooth side of a lyddite shell lying in the rack beside him.
“An’ this ’ere,” said the man who had brought the cocoa. He thrust forward the cumbersome hilt of a cutlass at his hip. The starlight gleamed dully on the steel guard.
“You won’t use that to-night, my son,” said the gunlayer. “We ain’t goin’ to ’ave no Broke an’ Swift song an’ dance to-night.” He stared out into the clear darkness. “We couldn’t never git near enough.” Nevertheless, he put out his hand in the gloom and reassured himself of the safety of a formidable bar of iron well within reach. Once in the annals of this war had a British destroyer come to grips at close quarters with the enemy; thereafter her crew walked the earth as men apart, and the darlings of the high gods.
The night grew suddenly darker. It was the mysterious hour that precedes the dawn, when warring men and sleeping animals stir and bethink them of the morrow. The destroyer slackened speed and turned, the{65} wide circle of her wake shimmering against the darkness of the water. As they turned, other dark shapes were visible abeam, moving at measured distance from each other without a light showing or a sound but the faint swish of the water past their sides. The flotilla had reached the limit of its beat, and swung round to resume the unending patrol.
{65}
Once from the starry sky came the drone of a seaplane moving up from its base that lay to the southward. Another
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