Reaction came with the following dawn: a weariness of the soul that no fatigue of the flesh can equal. All one’s energies seemed needed to combat the overwhelming desire for sleep, and the sensitive plate which records even absurdities in the mind holds little save one recollection of that dawn. But whatever has grown dim and been forgotten, the memory of a journey aft along the mess-deck in search of a cup of tea will always survive. The grey daylight struggled through the gunports and mingled with the sickly glare of electric lights along the narrow vista of the mess-deck. One watch of stokers had been relieved, and they lay where they had dropped on coming up from the stokehold. On every available inch of space along the deck sprawled a limp bundle of grimy rags that was a man asleep. It was like picking a pathway through a charnel-house of ebon dead. They lay on their backs with outstretched arms, or face downwards with their arms under their foreheads, in every imaginable attitude of jointless, abandoned exhaustion. The warm, sour smell of perspiration mingled with the aftermath of cordite fumes.... The guns’ crews beside their guns were silent. They stood or sat, arms akimbo, motionless in the apathy of reaction and fatigue, following the passer-by with their eyes.... Aft in the medical distributing station all was still as death. Men lay motionless, snoring beside the stretchers and operating tables. But as the Onlooker passed, something moved inside the arms of a sleeping man. A stumpy tail wagged, and the ponderous bulk of Jumbo, the mascot bulldog, rose, shook himself and trotted forward, grinning a greeting from one survivor of Jutland to another. CHAPTER VIII THE NAVY-UNDER-THE-SEA The year or so before the war found the Submarine Service still in its infancy, untried, unsung, a jest among the big-ship folk of the Navy-that-floats, who pointed with inelegant gestures from these hundred-feet cigar-shaped egg-shells to their own towering steel-shod rams and the nineteen-thousand-odd tons behind each of them. The Submarine Service had no leisure for jests at that time, even if they had seen anything particularly humorous about the comparison. In an intensely grim and practical way they were dreamers, “greatly dreaming”: and they knew that the day was not far off when these little wet ships of theirs would come into their own and hold, in the bow and stern of each fragile hull, the keys of death and of hell. The Navy-that-Floats--the Navy of aiguillettes and “boiled shirts,” of bathrooms and Sunday-morning divisions--dubbed them pirates. Pirates, because they went about His Majesty’s business in football sweaters and grey flannel trousers tucked into their huge sea-boots, returning to harbour with a week’s growth of beard and memories of their last bath grown dim.