Full Speed Ahead: Tales from the Log of a Correspondent with Our NavyBeston, Henry
History
Full Speed Ahead: Tales from the Log of a Correspondent with Our Navy
Beston, Henry
United States. Navy; World War, 1914-1918 -- Naval operations
The convalescent English Tommy in his sky-blue flannel suit, white
shirt, and orange four-in-hand, the heavier, tropic-bred Australian
with his hat brim knocked jauntily up to one side, the dark,
grey-eyed Scotch highlander very braw and bony in his plaited kilt,
these be picturesque figures on the streets of London, but the most
picturesque of all is our own American tar. Our "gobs" are always so
spruce and clean, and so young, young with their own youth and the
youth of the nation. Jack ashore is to be found at the Abbey at
almost any hour of the day, he wanders into the National Gallery, and
stands before Nelson at St. Paul's; he causes fair hearts to break
asunder at Hampton Court. Wherever you go in London, the wonderful
wide trousers, and the good old pancake hat, this last worn cockily
over one eye, are always to be seen in what nautical writers of the
Victorian school call "the offing."
Our boys come in liberty parties of thirty and forty from the various
bases, usually under the wing of a chief petty officer very conscious
of his responsibility for these wild sailor souls. Accommodations
are taken either at a good London hotel with which the authorities
have some arrangement, or the personnel is distributed among various
huts and hospitable dwellings. The great rallying centre is sure to
be the Eagle Hut off the Strand.
This famous hut, which every soldier or sailor who visits London will
long remember, is situated, by a happy coincidence, in modern
London's most New Yorkish area. It stands, a huddle of low,
inconspicuous buildings, in just such a raw open space between three
streets as on this side prefigures the building of a new skyscraper;
the great, modern mass of Australia House lifts its imposing Beaux
Arts façade a little distance above it, whilst the front of a
fashionable hotel rises against the sky just beyond. The ragged
island, the sense of open space, the fine high buildings, ... "say,
wouldn't you think you were back in America again?" Yet only a few
hundred feet down the Strand, old St. Clement Danes lies like a ship
of stone anchored in the thoroughfare, and Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,
stands bareheaded in the sun wondering what has happened to the
world. The hut within is simply an agglomeration of big, clean,
rectangular spaces, reading rooms, living rooms, dormitories, and
baths always full of husky, pink figures, steam and the smell of
soap. Physically, Eagle hut is merely the larger counterpart of some
thousand others. The wonder of the place is its atmosphere. The
narrow threshold might be three thousand miles in width, for cross
it, and you will find yourself in America. All the dear, distinctive
national things for which your soul and body have hungered and
thirsted are gathered here. There is actually an American shoe
shining stand, an American barber chair, and, Heaven be praised,
"good American grub." It is a sight to see the long counter thronged
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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