Few officers or men from the western front can visit the Fleet; but the winds of chance, which blow casualties and convalescents all about Great Britain, drop a few of them down in spots where the Fleet, as Mr. Bone draws it, is under their eyes. Drawings like those of “A Fleet Seascape” (LXXXIX) and “A Line of Destroyers” (LXXXVI) awake recollections of guard duty in a small Scotch fishing village; of the majestic seaward procession through the midsummer night, before the battle of Jutland; of the return from the fight, the destroyers streaming tranquilly back to their moorings under the hill, with the great searchlight wheeling to and fro along the sea outside them, like a sentry moving alertly on his post; a few wounded ships steaming in more sedately, or taking a tow, one with a couple of funnels knocked out of the straight, another with a field-dressing of bedding stuffed into a hole in her side, and the whole wound, apparently, smeared with red paint, as the surgeons smear flesh wounds with yellow; and then of the coming ashore, the men triumphant and happy, the officers learning with astonishment and indignation that people at home had heard more of losses than of the victory. Mr. Bone’s drawings give an insight into the world of the Navy to which these random glimpses can add nothing. “H.M.S. ‘Lion’ in dry dock” (LXXXIII) is wonderful, technically--if a layman may judge--and in spirit. A whole aspect of modern naval life is lit up by “A boiler-room on a battleship” (XCIII). For, to the astonished landsman visiting a man-of-war, the sailors of to-day seem to work and eat and sleep in a variety of engineering laboratories, surrounded by countless wheels, handles, buttons and bells for the evocation or dismissal of the genies of steam, petrol and electricity. Nothing could be more unlike the lower decks of seventeenth and eighteenth century battleships as we imagine them. The only things which have not changed, from the days of Drake to those of Hawke, and from Nelson’s time to Beatty’s, are the hereditary instinct for the sea and the fine fighting temperament of officers and men. G. H. Q., FRANCE, _April, 1917_ LXXXI “OILING”: A BATTLESHIP TAKING IN OIL FUEL AT SEA Viewed from the bridge. A large oil “tanker” is alongside. Unseen, but very fast, the oil fuel is running into the battleship. How great a boon this new fuel is can be understood, at any rate partly, by those who have endured the coaling of a great ship in the old way. The scene shown in the drawing was animated by the changeful gleam of the gay signal flags flapping in the foreground and by the flashing of the wings of innumerable hungry gulls. [Illustration] LXXXII ON A BATTLE-CRUISER (H.M.S. “LION”) The ship’s funnel behind and the sailor’s figure on the left help to give the scale of the great gun. [Illustration] LXXXIII H.M.S. “LION” IN DRY DOCK