A FLEET IN BEING NOTES OF TWO TRIPS WITH THE CHANNEL SQUADRON BY RUDYARD KIPLING MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1914 _COPYRIGHT_. _First Edition, December_ 1898. _Reprinted, December_ 1898; _January, February, May, and October_ 1899, 1910, 1914. A FLEET IN BEING CHAPTER I ‘. . . . _the sailor men_ _That sail upon the seas_, _To fight the Wars and keep the Laws_, _And live on yellow_ peas’ ‘A Gunroom Ditty-Box.’ G. S. BOWLES. Some thirty of her Majesty’s men-of-war were involved in this matter; say a dozen battleships of the most recent, and seventeen or eighteen cruisers; but my concern was limited to one of a new type commanded by an old friend. I had some dim knowledge of the interior of a warship, but none of the new world into which I stepped from a Portsmouth wherry one wonderful summer evening in ’97. With the exception of the Captain, the Chief Engineer, and maybe a few petty officers, nobody was more than twenty-eight years old. They ranged in the ward-room from this resourceful age to twenty-six or seven clear-cut, clean-shaved young faces with all manner of varied experience behind them. When one comes to think, it is only just that a light 20-knot cruiser should be handled, under guidance of an older head, by affable young gentlemen prepared, even sinfully delighted, to take chances not set down in books. She was new, they were new, the Admiral was new, and we were all off to the Manœuvres together—thirty keels next day threading their way in and out between a hundred and twenty moored vessels not so fortunate. We opened the ball, for the benefit of some foreign warships, with a piece of rather pretty steering. A consort was coming up a waterlane, between two lines of shipping, just behind us; and we nipped in immediately ahead of her, precisely as a hansom turning out of Bond Street nips in in front of a City ’bus. Distance on water is deceptive, and when I vowed that at one crisis I could have spat on the wicked ram of our next astern, pointed straight at our naked turning side, the ward-room laughed. ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ said a gentleman of twenty-two. ‘Wait till we have to keep station to-night. It’s my middle watch.’ ‘Close water-tight doors, then,’ said a Sub-Lieutenant. ‘I say’ (this to the passenger) ‘if you find a second-class cruiser’s ram in the small of your back at midnight don’t be alarmed.’ FASCINATING GAME OF GENERAL POST