Except for the actual lift she receives from a wave, a battleship rolling in a beam sea moves a good deal like an inverted pendulum, so that one feels a minimum of motion when he is down against the skin of a lower hold and the maximum in the foretop. The transition had been a sudden one for me that morning, for the Gunnery Lieutenant, who had been initiating me into the secrets of "Director Firing" in the foretop, brought me back to the main deck and turned me over to the Senior Engineer, who had volunteered to show me what "rough weather" stoking was like.

The big ship was wallowing with that ever-disconcerting "hang" at the end of a roll, such a pause as one never experiences in an ocean liner which (with no heavy guns and only light upper works) needs no great amount of time to make up its mind as to whether or not it is worth while going to the trouble of getting back on an even keel. As we put one reeling steel ladder after another above us in our descent, the roll decreased as the tumult of crashing waves was stilled to muffled jolts, and, with a flight or two still to go, we were steady enough on our feet to have both hands free to lift the heavy air-tight "flap" of the boiler-room.

As I ducked under the "flap" the chill, damp, clammily clinging air of the decks above was assailed by a sharp blast which, however hot and dry, was still (at least in comparison with the heavy atmosphere of the higher 'tween decks spaces) fresh and invigorating. Although far from an earthly paradise in a ship on an equatorial run, the stokehold of a battleship that is battened down against heavy winter weather is in some respects the most comfortable spot aboard her.

Certainly the half-dozen brawny fellows who sat or lounged against the steel bulkhead of the half of the boiler-room into which we had descended did not look to be having anything like so bad a time of it as an equal number of oilskinned seamen I had seen but a few minutes before bracing themselves against the seas sweeping the icy forecastle deck as they tried to repair a smashed ventilator. Grimy they were, to be sure, but otherwise there was little about them to suggest the sweating, stripped-to-the-waist, in-to-the-last-gasp stoker of romance and popular fancy.

To one who has pictured the stoker as a gaunt-eyed demon steadily shovelling coal under a boiler for four hours, the first glimpse of a stokehold of a warship that is in no great hurry to get somewhere will come as a good deal of a surprise. The place is neither especially dirty nor especially hot. Neither the letting the coal slide down by its own weight from the encompassing bunkers nor the cracking up of the occasional lumps which are too large for even combustion raises as much dust as the dumping of a single sack upon one of the upper decks.

The footing on the grilled steel plates of the deck is firm and sure, and, as I have said, there is less motion in the stokehold than in any other part of the ship. It might conceivably happen in destroyers, but the stories of men half-roasted from being thrown against the furnace doors in storms do not originate on battleships.

But let us see how these comfortable, easy-moving chaps manage to handle the fuel sufficient to send twenty-five or thirty thousand tons of steel hurtling through the seas with so little apparent haste or effort. The running back of a sliding steel door brings a stream of coal running out of one of the bunkers, coal which, dumped from sacks into the entrance of a chute on one of the upper decks, has worked its way downward by gravity as that beneath it has been fed to the furnaces. This stream is caught in a "skip" of steel, shaped like the half of a cylinder and capable of holding something like a couple of hundredweight. Sliding fairly easily over the grilled deck—pushed by one man and pulled by another—the "skip" loads are dumped evenly along in front of the twelve doors which open—four to each—to the three furnaces under the boilers occupying this half of the stokehold. Now we come to the actual stoking.

A bell suddenly clangs, echoing sharply from the steel walls, and instantly two of the lounging figures quicken to the alert. One scoops up a shovelful of coal and the other steps forward and rests a hand on the lever running to one of the furnace doors. A second or two later, as a number shows on a dial at the side, the latter pushes the lever sharply, and the door is pressed upwards, revealing a glowing bed of fire running back out of sight under the boiler. The shovel is already swinging forward as the door rises, and, missing that steel plate by a fraction of an inch, its contents are discharged—with a quick "wristy" motion which scatters the coal evenly over the fire—into the furnace.

As the shovel is drawn back the lever is released, permitting the door to fall shut of its own weight. With all possible speed another scoop is filled with coal and the operation repeated once or twice more according to the speed which it is desired to maintain. Then the two men relax and stand at ease until another clanging of the bell heralds the number of the next furnace to be fired. Then the door is lifted and the coal thrown in as before, the operation going on until each of the twelve has received its two, three, or four shovels, when—always subject to the indicator on the wall—it begins over again.

If a lump of coal is larger than a man's fist it is cracked up before being thrown into the furnace. As the stoker swings his filled shovel toward the opening door his trained eye is looking for two things—a pronounced hollow in the bed of coals, or a spot in which the duller glow tells him the combustion is considerably advanced. If neither is visible he gives his shovel a very sharp side flirt and spreads its contents just as widely and evenly as he possibly can. If he observes a hollow he endeavours to even it up with fresh coal. A burnt-out spot also receives fresh fuel, and if there is evidence of the formation of a crust of "clinker," this may be marked for a subsequent cracking up with the "slice," a long steel bar which serves the purpose of a poker. Every effort is bent toward maintaining a smooth, evenly burning bed of coals under all of the boiler.

Automatic regulation of stoking is no new thing in warships, and was even in use on the latest of the Atlantic liners running before the war. The machine most commonly in use by the British is the "Kilroy," and its object is to raise a given amount of steam with a minimum of coal and physical effort.

Thoroughly to understand its workings one should go first to the engine-room, from where it is regulated. The order for a certain speed is sent from the bridge to the engine-room, and the engineer sets his "Kilroy" so that the stoking shall proceed at a rate calculated to produce the necessary steam. The dial of the machine is numbered from "3" to "12," and the number he turns the indicator to—say "7"—rings up the numbers of the furnace doors in the boiler-room at a rate which will ensure that each shall be stoked every seven minutes.

The number of shovelfuls of coal to be thrown in at each stoking is determined by consulting first the telegraph from the bridge (which registers in both the engine-room and stokehold) and a table which each stoker knows by heart. The dial of the telegraph is marked as follows: "Keep Steam," "Stop," "Slow," "Half Speed," "Full Speed," "More Steam." The table referred to gives the number of shovels to be thrown on at each stoking to fulfil the direction on the telegraph. Thus "Slow" calls for from two to three shovels of coal, "Full" four to six, and "More Steam" from six to eight.

This plan gives perhaps the most perfect control of stoking possible without mechanical handling of the coal, and that is hardly practicable on shipboard. Practically all modern coal-burning ships carry a small supply of oil fuel, which is, however, generally used very sparingly and kept for raising steam pressure quickly in great emergency.

It was while I was being initiated into the technique of stoking by shovelling coal under the boilers at the rate indicated to keep the steam at "Half" that a change of course brought the swinging seas dead abeam and set the ship rolling even more drunkenly than before. After failing to hit the "dark spots" and "hollows" two or three times as I staggered to the roll, and once even missing the furnace door itself, one of the stokers, taking compassion, relieved me of the scoop and put the trouble right with half a dozen quickly tossed shovelfuls.

I was frankly glad to work over to where I could take a "half Nelson" round a bar by the starboard bunker, for the way the open mouth of the furnace was suddenly jumping up at me in the lurches was something more than disconcerting, especially after one of my fellow stokers had told me that his scarred forearm was the result of having once been pitched forward against a red-hot door of the furnace under a destroyer's boiler.

It was easy to see that stoking the furnaces of a ship with a 25 to 30 degree roll is no job for a novice. Keeping one's balance without holding on to something was difficult enough all of the time, and there were intervals when it was a sheer impossibility. Yet the inexorable gong rang out its warnings just the same, and when the number of the door to be stoked slipped into place on the dial, the particular stretch of glowing coals commanded by that aperture had to be fed willy-nilly.

With the coal "skip" doing a dervish dance from one end to the other of the narrow space, and with even lumps of the coal itself indulging in punitive expeditions on their own account, the waiting stoker needed all the quick-wittedness and shifty-footedness of a bull-fighter combined with the nicety of balance of a tight-rope walker to carry on at all. Yet carry on he did, and with only less clocklike a regularity than the imperturbable "Kilroy" itself.

A heavy slam-banging from the opposite end of the boiler-room indicated that things were not going quite so smoothly there, and edging cautiously along I was presently able to get some hint of the cause from the words of a volubly cursing stoker who limped out to tell me that the "blinkin' skip 'as took charge." Rubbing a bruised shin and glowering balefully from a blackened eye which appeared to have bumped against a boiler, he explained, in language more forceful than elegant, that some unpractical theorist had encouraged them to experiment with wheels on the side of the skip with the idea of making it easier to push about over the coal-cluttered deck. This had turned out a very satisfactory "safe-in-harbour" expedient, but the increased mobility which had been so useful in fair weather had proved its undoing in foul.

In the picturesque language of the sea, it had "taken charge," and so effectually that one swift, straight rush to starboard, followed by a "googly" progress back to port, put every man who, either by chance or intent, barred its way more or less hors de combat. When I peeped gingerly round a corner the sight I saw was vividly suggestive of those good old days of mass play American football when a burly half-back was bucking the line of his demoralised opponents.

The heavy three-quarters-full skip had slammed down against the port bunkers when the ship rolled to that side, and in the second or two she hung there before swinging back again half a dozen men had thrown themselves upon it in an effort to "clip its wings" by removing the wheels. Either the time was too short, or else they had got in each other's way.

At any rate, the wheels were still in position to go round when the battleship, sliding down the reverse of the big wave that had thrown her over, tilted her decks back the other way. Straight down the one-in-three incline from the port to the starboard bunkers lolloped the Juggernaut, dashing the protesting anatomies of the stokers to left and right as it went. Spitting blood and oaths indiscriminately, one man clung to it all the way, however, and he it was who, taking advantage of the tilt, finally rendered it harmless by pushing it over on its side, where it was left wriggling impotently like an overturned turtle.

Meanwhile the "Kilroy" had been ringing up its numbers in vain, and it took several minutes of fast shovelling by all hands to bring the fires up to where they would have been had the interruption not occurred.

It was about this time that the bridge called on the engine-room for an increase of speed, and it was that, with a change of course, that sent the mounting seas crashing over the starboard bow, which brought my visit to the stokeholds to a sudden and unceremonious end. There came a shivering crash, followed by a momentary halt like that which throws one against his neighbour in a jerkily-braked tramcar.

The great ship staggered groggily for a second or two as a weight of solid water equal to her own was launched against her. Then the relentless urge of her spinning screws drove her forward, with the dish of her rigid hull skimming a few thousand tons off the top of the uprearing wave that had assailed her. The most of the mighty cataclysm surged to lee and back into the sea again, but wherever there was an opening—by gun-port, by ventilator, by unbattened hatch—it poured below in thunderous torrents. Deck by deck, where we had descended so laboriously by tilting ladders, we heard it bounding lower and lower, and then (just how and by where I never exactly understood) the flood was all about us.

"If we ship two or three more like that it'll be getting to the fires," shouted the warrant officer who had taken me over from the Senior Engineer; "we'll only be in the way here; we'd best get up while we can. I've stood all the watches I care to in flooded stokeholds in the years I was a stoker myself."

Over steel plates that were rocking with the wash of the water that had penetrated beneath them, he led me to a little electric lift into which the two of us were just able to crowd and slide the door. "Never thought much of this thing," he said as the car began to ascend after two or three propitiatory prods at the button; "there's too much chance of getting stalled halfway and spending the night like a tinned herring. But even that would be better than getting caught by another waterfall on one of the ladders. Besides, she seems to be going all right anyway."

Half a minute later the little lift came to a creaking standstill, and we squeezed out to a ladder which led up to the main deck. The wash swirled to our knees in an angle of the mess-deck, but the warrant officers' mess, to which I was conducted by my guide, was warm and dry. Toasting bread for our tea in the genial glow of the electric heater, he told me yarns of the days when he himself had (to use his own picturesque expression) "stood at the small end of a shovel" before the furnace doors.

He had once been scalded with escaping steam in the hold of an old cruiser off the coast of South America, once imprisoned in the stokehold of a destroyer for forty-eight hours in a gale in the sub-Arctic, and once he had been "mentioned" for putting out a fire started by a German shell in some nondescript craft in which he found himself at the time the British Navy was trying to protect the retreat along the Flemish coast. The latter sounded like a "story," and I threw a "lead" or two to draw it out. This was about all I got.

"The old Flighty got in too close," he said, turning the slice on his toasting fork, "and the Huns opened up on us with bigger stuff than we reckoned they had there. There was a big crash, just like when a big lump of sea hits you, only worse, and all the stokers and me (I was a petty officer then) was knocked flat. We were under forced draught, and the fires needing all the coal we could pitch on to them. No one was much hurt, and I got them to shovelling again as soon as I could. Then I took a squint up the ventilator down which most of the shock seemed to come.

"There was a bit of a fire getting under way up there, and so I pitched up two or three buckets of water and put it out. Didn't notice till afterwards that a small fragment of shell had come down and hit me in the forehead—right here" (touching a jagged cut just under the hair).

"Captain seemed rather pleased about it, as the men on fire station in that part of the ship had been knocked out, and he appeared to think I had kept the blaze from getting a big headway.

"'Nother funny thing"—and he went on to tell of a stoker of a trawler who, after having his face slightly scalded by steam, had lain down and gone to sleep with his head pillowed among some of the steward's recent purchases, and of how the cook, foraging in the twilight and starting to pick up what he thought was a boiled lobster, had nearly pulled off one of the unlucky chap's burned ears!

I sought the fo'c'sle deck for a breath of fresh air after that, and pushed my head out of the after superstructure just as a hulking cinder came winging aft before the snoring north-east gale. It was quite possible (I said to myself as I ducked inside and pulled down my eyelid in an endeavour to deposit the unwelcome fragment on my cheek) that this very cinder was one which I myself had dumped down one of the bunker chutes during our last coaling.

At any rate, I knew that, save for that last leg skywards by way of the furnaces, I had followed the path of the coal from the collier to the funnel-top, and even a bit further. I had, therefore, no legitimate cause for resentment over the fact that it had taken to following me.