While lunching with Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee in the course of a recent visit to the Grand Fleet, which must always remain one of the most memorable experiences of my life, I ventured the opinion that the work of the British Navy in sweeping every enemy vessel—warship and merchant steamer—from the surface of the Seven Seas, was the one most outstanding achievement of the war.

"Perhaps you are right," said the victor of the Battle of the Falklands thoughtfully, "but you must not lose sight of the fact that to win this victory over the German the British sailor has had to win an even more remarkable victory over himself. At the outbreak of the war I had every confidence that, in one way or another, we would be able to establish a control of the sea quite as complete as that which we actually have established; but, if any one could have assured me that the foundations of that control would have to rest upon the Grand Fleet being based in this isolated harbour, with the men practically cut off from intercourse with the world for months at a time, I must confess that I might have been—well, somewhat less sure, to say the least. Certainly I would never have dared more than to hope that the moral of the men of the Fleet, far from being lowered by the most trying experience of the kind sailors have ever been called upon to endure, would actually be heightened. On the score of enthusiasm and 'lust for battle,' there could not, of course, have been any improvement, but this has given way to a cheerful, high-spirited willingness which, if possible, makes the Fleet a more efficient fighting unit with every day that passes. If you will observe well the spirit of the men of the Grand Fleet at a time when the German Fleet—based though it is in the Kiel Canal, where regular shore-leave is easy to arrange—is filled with unrest and threatened with mutiny, I think you will agree with me the keeping of the British sailor in a healthy state of mind and body, without once letting him verge on 'staleness,' is worthy to rank as an achievement with that of keeping the enemy off the seas."

Evidence of the high spirits of the men of the Grand Fleet I had been having from the moment I sighted the first car-load of returning-from-leave sailors on my journey up from London, but the occasion on which I was the most impressed was the morning on which I was allowed the honour of helping to coal ship by wheeling 2-cwt. sacks on a barrow for a couple of hours, an experience the memory of which promises long to outlast even the not unlingering stiffness of my dorsal muscles. The ship had not been ordered, and was not expecting to be ordered to sea, and there was no reason to rush the coaling save to be free to take up some other of the regular grind of routine drudgery next in order.

I have watched warships coaling in many ports of the world, but never have I seen men working under the stimulus of extra shore-leave at Gibraltar, Nagasaki, or Valparaiso get the stuff into bunkers faster than did those lusty men of the good old "X——" that misty morning in Scapa Flow. Almost every man who was not smoking was singing, and even out of the dust-choked inferno of the collier's holds, the beat of a chesty chorus welled up in the pauses of the grinding winches.

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."

"Outside polishing brass and holystoning the deck," he went on, "there is a deal more work in a warship in war-time than in days of peace, so that we are never hard put to find a field for extra effort. We learn much quicker from practice than we did from theory, and there is an astonishing amount of work going on all the time to the end that the ship shall be kept as up to date as possible in all her equipment. The increase of a ship's offensive and defensive power, making her better to fight with and safer to fight in, is naturally a work in which the men are vitally interested, and they go into it with a will. We try as far as possible to avoid simply putting the men through the motions of work, like doing unnecessary painting or scrubbing, for instance. If the ship does not provide for the moment enough real work, we try to find it on the beach. For the next few days, for example, we are sending several hundred men ashore to make roads on one of the islands. They are very keen about the change, and I have heard them speaking about it all to-day. That kind of a thing works much better than simply improvising work on board. It gives variety, and the men feel that they are doing something useful instead of simply being kept busy.

"So much for work. On the score of play, we aim to give the men rather more athletic sports than they would have in harbour in peace-time, though all of it has to be carried on with many less 'frills'—flag-dressings, tea-parties, and the like—under the limiting conditions of always being ready to put to sea at notice of a few hours. In the ship, doubling round the deck for exercise is kept up regularly, as is also a certain number of Swedish drills. Every encouragement is given to the men to box, and the ship, squadron, and Fleet championships in the various classes are, of course, great events. There is scarcely a drifter or patrol-boat without one or more sets of boxing-gloves, for there is no form of sport quite so well calculated to exercise both mind and body in restricted quarters.

"Water-sports—swimming, rowing, and sailing—are kept up about as in peace-time, though here the long spell of inclement weather makes the winter rather a longer 'closed season' than farther south. Ashore there are several indifferent cricket and football grounds, though not, however, nearly enough for the normal demand of the great number—it runs well up into six figures—of able-bodied, sport-loving men in the Fleet. A good deal of hockey is played, and we have found it a better wet-weather game than football. In all of these sports inter-ship and inter-squadron rivalry is encouraged, principally because it stimulates the minds of so many outside the actual participants.

"Many of the officers have their golf clubs and tennis racquets, and though our links and courts would hardly satisfy the critical eyes of St. Andrews or 'Queens' professionals, they have been a big help to us. Cross-country runs and paper-chases, up and down the steep hills and over the soggy peat bogs, are taken part in by both men and officers, and for flesh-reducing, muscle-hardening, and chest-expanding are about the best thing we have. The tug-of-war is a traditional Navy sport, for it can, if necessary, be enjoyed on shipboard as well as ashore. The great pride which the men of a ship take in the success of its team makes this also a very useful sport for its 'psychologic' value.

"Amusements pure and simple—the kinema and theatricals—are a new thing with us (at least while on active service) and the scheme is still in process of development. For a number of reasons it is impracticable for professional troupes to visit the Grand Fleet in the same way as they have been going to France to entertain the Army. The greater distance is against it, as is also the fact that we have no place to put them up. Again, as there is no place where they could perform to more than a thousand men (at the outside) at one time, it would obviously take some months to make a round of the Fleet. The fact that the visitors might awake almost any morning to find themselves on the way to a sea-fight is also a deterrent. All of these things have made it necessary for us to shift for ourselves in the matter of entertainment.

"Each ship, of course, has always had its band and orchestra, and concerts and rather crude theatrical shows have been features of Navy life from time immemorial. The trouble with the shows, however, has always been the amount of improvising that they entailed, especially in the matter of a stage, footlights, seats, and the like. Before the war the men usually managed to find time to paint and rig 'flies' and 'drops,' devise lighting effects, and even to fix up some kind of 'auditorium.' Here, with the whole ship standing by for orders to put to sea, all of this was out of the question. Under these circumstances, the man who first conceived the idea of a special 'theatre ship' deserves a monument as a benefactor to the British Navy.

"The suggestion was to provide a steamer on which a permanent stage, complete with sets of scenery, exits and entrances, footlights, sidelights, and dressing-rooms, had been installed; also sufficient seats to accommodate as many of the crew of a battleship as could ever be off duty at one time. The thing would have been worth while a dozen times over, even if it had been necessary to detach a three or four thousand-ton steamer for no other purpose. Luckily, the plan chanced to dove-tail to a nicety with the functions of a steamer which, in carrying frozen beef to the Fleet, laid alongside each ship for from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The stage, auditorium, and the rest were built without interfering in the least with the steamer's regular work, nor have the some hundreds of performances already given aboard been responsible for the least interruption in our supply of frozen beef. As for the shows, she is discharging to the 'X——' of our squadron to-day, and you can go over to-night and see one for yourself.

"The trouble with the 'theatre ship' idea is that it is too long between shows. Between the battleship and the endless auxiliaries, it may easily take from two to three months for the beef-cum-theatre steamer to make the full round of the Fleet, an interval which we had to find some way of bridging with other entertainment. It was a difficult problem in many ways, and it is only within the last month or two that we have found—through the kinema—a satisfactory solution. Every ship in the Fleet has now its projector, and, through an organisation formed in London for that purpose, a continuous supply of the latest and best films is sent up and circulated at a cost to us that is almost negligible. The films on arrival at the Depot Ship which houses the Post Office, are listed and filed, to be distributed to the various units in accordance with their demands.

"Each ship has a daily bulletin of the new films arriving, and at once sends in an application for its preference, with two or three alternatives should the first choice have gone to a prior claimant. The scheme has been successful beyond words. Each ship has a nightly performance, the projector being at the disposal of the men during the week, and of the officers on Saturday. All share in the cost of it, which only comes to a shilling or two per head a month. With a little larger supply of the more popular films, the development of this kinema scheme promises to give us everything we could possibly ask on the score of evening amusement. About the only thing left to do would be to buy a few picture-taking machines, let the officers and men write the scenarios, and start making films on our own account. If it turns out that we're to be here another year or two, I don't doubt that's what we will be doing."

There is not a great deal that I can add to this comprehensive summary of the way work and play have been administered with such success in maintaining the moral of the men of the Grand Fleet. The show in the "theatre ship" that night I found well worth the wet launch trip in a sloppy sea. It consisted of two parts of varieties and one of burlesque. Most of the numbers had been under rehearsal for several weeks, and the whole affair went off with all the aplomb of a London Revue. No "accessories"—from posters to programmes—were missing, not even the Censor.

An officer sitting next me, calling my attention to the blank back of the programme, said that he had written some "advertisements" to fill it, but that the Censor had banned them at the last moment as "not proper." As a matter of fact, there was far less in the whole show played by men to men, as it was, to "bring a blush to the cheek" than in the average West End Revue. A certain "chilliness" in the atmosphere of the auditorium, due to the fact that it was situated immediately over one of the refrigerating chambers, was more than neutralised by the warm reception the packed audience gave the show from the opening chorus to "God Save the King."

I managed to spend a few minutes at the nightly kinema show on several battleships. All of the available seats were invariably packed, with the enthusiasm tremendous, especially for the "knock-about" pictures. Charlie Chaplin appeared to be a ten-to-one favourite over any one else—both in the Ward Rooms and in the Lower Decks—and the demand for films in which he figured was a good deal greater than the available supply. The "sentimental" Mary Pickford sort of films were rather more popular than the men cared to show by their applause, but the harrowing "suffering-mother-and-child" subjects they would have none of. A rather poor film of Rider Haggard's She which I saw was very coldly received by both men and officers. The Official War films of all of the Allies were always sure of a rousing reception. A special treat was the picture of the King's recent visit to the Grand Fleet, which offered men and officers the exciting sport of "finding" themselves on various sectors of it. Travel films were in little demand, the reason for which was perhaps supplied by one of my "coaling-mates," who said that the only kind of travel "movie" that he was interested in was the woods of Scotland running north at sixty miles an hour past the window of his homebound train.

Besides the more or less organised forms of work and play, many of the men in the Fleet have some sort of a hobby to which they turn in the rare intervals which might otherwise be spent in "thumb-twirling" and "thinking," those twin enemies of "The Contented Sailor." Thousands of men "make things"—not the old ship-in-a-bottle seaside bar ornament sort, but objects of real usefulness. One officer had become a specialist on electrical heating contrivances, and had equipped the wardroom with cigar-lighters to work with the ship's "juice" and save matches. Another was making his own golf clubs, and I heard of a Captain of Royal Marines of noble lineage who had fabricated a very "wearable" pair of Norwegian ski-boots. There are so many skilled artisans among the men that one is not surprised to see them making almost anything; nevertheless, the gunner of one of the battleships who—with the sole exception of the lens—made a complete kinema projecting machine, did a very creditable piece of work.

Some of the senior Naval Officers have gone in for stock-breeding, overflowing to the land in their endeavours to find room to expand. Pig-raising is the most popular line, and there is great rivalry between the several "sty proprietors." A certain distinguished sailor—his name is a byword to the English people—discoursed learnedly to me for fifteen minutes on the strategy of the Battle of Jutland, and then, turning to a visiting officer, spoke with equal facility, and even greater enthusiasm, of his success in crossing the "China Poland" with the "Ordinary Orkney" to increase (or was it to reduce?) the "streak" in the bacon. He called the new breed the "Chinorkland," or something like that, and if the fact that he was planning three or four generations ahead conveys anything as to the view the Navy takes regarding the duration of the war, my readers—with the Censor's indulgence—are welcome to the tip.