Time and again (until I learned how to defeat the manoeuvre) men behind me in the line pushed their barrows in ahead and made off with sacks that should have been mine to shift, and time and again (until I had found my second wind and my "coaling legs") the rollicking Jack Tar just behind me put his speeding barrow into one of my by no means slow-moving heels. The several hundred tons of coal which went down the chutes between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. on that ordinary "routine" morning was shifted at a rate that would have been entirely creditable to a crew filling their bunkers for a long-deferred homeward voyage. I did not have another opportunity to discuss with Admiral Sturdee the manner in which the miracle of "Fleet moral" had been wrought, but an officer of the battleship in which I stayed summed the thing up succinctly. "I quite understand," I had said, "why the physical health of the Fleet should be the best ever known--why no battleship averages more than two or three sick at a time. The long months away from the germ-laden air of the land is sufficient to account for that. But how, after these three years and a half between the Devil, the Deep Sea, and the Scotch Mist, the men are still exuberant enough to want to push barrows of coal faster than a landsman, like myself (who is pushing for the sheer luxury of the thing), or how they are still full enough of _joie de vivre_ to enjoy fits of singing between fits of coughing in the hold of a collier, is beyond my comprehension. How did you do it?" The reply was prompt and to the point, and seems to me to disclose the secret in a nutshell. "By giving them," he said, "both more work and more play than they had in peace-time; in other words, by cutting down to a minimum the time in which to twirl their thumbs and think."