“Well, boys ...?” he said, and walked towards the door as the bugles began to blare along mess-deck and battery. * * * * * Concealment of his emotions is not a marked characteristic of the British bluejacket or marine, whatever affectations may be cherished by his officers in that respect. The exultant speculations, prophecies, and thanksgiving of a thousand men, crowded in those confined spaces, met the ear with a noise like the sea. Commonplace sounds suddenly acquired a thrilling significance, and the clang of the securing chains of the guns as they were released, the tireless drone of the turbines far below, shrilling pipe and blare of bugle overhead, combined to set the pulses at a gallop. The Onlooker passed forward through that electrical tide of emotion and laughing men that surged towards the hatchways, and _en route_ overtook a leading seaman. He was normally a staid, unemotional individual, known best (from the standpoint of censor) as an incorrigible letter-writer. He was capering, literally capering, along the battery. And as he capered he shouted: “They’re out, lads! they’re out! Christ! They’re out this time!” And out they were, for presently, on the wind that sang past the naked rails of the forebridge and the bellying halliards, came the first grumble of gunfire out of the haze ahead. Perhaps it was the utter absence of colour, the dull grey monochrome of sea and sky, ships and smoke, that heightened the resemblance of what followed to the shifting scene of a cinema show. It robbed even dire calamity of all terror at the time. It seemed incredible that the cruiser on the starboard quarter, ringed all about with yeasty pinnacles of water, was one of ours, being hammered to extinction by the guns of an enemy invisible. The eye followed her dispassionately as she ran that desperate gauntlet of pitching salvos; and when the end came, and she changed in the flutter of an eyelid into a cloud of black smoke, it was some time before a subconscious voice said to the Onlooker: “There goes gallant Sir Robert ... and you’ll never shake Dicky Carter by the hand again....” * * * * * Equally remote and unreal were the effects of our own gunfire, seen and lost and glimpsed again in that ever-shifting North Sea haze. A crippled German destroyer, crawling out of range, down by the stern, like a hare whose hindquarters have been paralysed by a clumsy sportsman: an enemy light cruiser, dismasted, funnels over the side, one gun spitting defiance from a shambles of a battery as she sank: a great battleship listing over, all aswarm with specks of humanity--surely it was none of our noisy doing? And then suddenly a salvo of 14-inch shells “straddled” us, and a yeoman of signals beside the Onlooker put out a hand and pulled him behind the shelter of a canvas wind-screen.