“The surface of the sea’s good enough for me,” chipped in No. 2. “I don’t want to bomb women or torpedo merchant ships. I’m going to be captain of a destroyer.” He raised his head. “Thirty knots at night, my boy!... Upper-deck torpedo tubes and all that....” “I’d blow you out of the water with a 12-inch gun,” said Number 5, speaking for the first time, and laying aside a magazine. “Gunnery is going to save this country if ever we have a war. That’s why gunnery lieutenants get promoted quickly--my governor told me so.” “Did he?” said the stroke oar. “He’s wrong. You can only fire big guns from big ships, and you know what happened to big ships in the Russo-Japanese war.” “What?” inquired the visionary coldly. “Mines. Big ships can’t move when there are mines about.” “We don’t use mines any longer,” said the coxswain, crumpling up his empty bag and throwing it over the side. It floated slowly past the boat towards the head of the valley. “They’re not considered sporting. ’Sides, even if you could, you can always countermine, and sweep ’em up. My brother went through a course in the Mediterranean once--place called Platea. I remember him telling me about it.” The stroke oar sat upright and glanced the length of the boat. “Wouldn’t it be a rum thing,” he said, “if there was a war some day and we were all in it.” He ticked off their names on his fingers: “Submarine, aeroplane, destroyer, minelayer, minesweeper, battleship----” He paused. “I’d like to be in a cruiser,” he said. “A big cruiser scouting ahead of the Fleet. You’d get more excitement there than anywhere.” His voice deepened to a sudden note of triumph. “It ’ud be the forefront of the battle.” “Then we’d all meet afterwards,” said Number 2, “and have a blow-out somewhere ashore and talk about our experiences. Wouldn’t that be topping?” The bow oar sat with his eyes on the crumpled paper bag that floated up-stream, shading them against the glow of the sun turning all the creeks into molten gold. “Those of us that were left,” he said dreamily. “Tide’s turned.... We’d better think about getting back.” [Illustration] CHAPTER I “USQUE AB OVO” Reminiscences of those days “in the distance enchanted” never come in an orderly procession according to the original sequence of events. Some, for reasons quite inexplicable, jostle their way to the fore readily enough. Others, dim and elusive, hover in the background, and only respond to the lure of firelight and tobacco smoke ascending incense-wise from the depths of the arm-chair. Sooner or later, though, they can all be caught and held for the moment needed to record them. The difficulty is to know where to start.... Harker is foremost among the “thrusters” in the surging crowd of memories of the old _Britannia_ days. Harker, with his piercing, rather melancholy eyes, his black beard and tattooed wrists, and his air of implacable ferocity that for months succeeded in concealing from his term a heart as tender as a woman’s.