Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/166

148 of these ships never sailed the waves. All men on board were naval officers or enlisted men; they were all volunteers and comprised men of all ranks—admirals, captains, commanders, and midshipmen. All had temporarily abandoned His Majesty's uniform for garments picked up in second-hand clothing stores. They had made the somewhat disconcerting discovery that carefully trained gentlemen of the naval forces, when dressed in cast-off clothing and when neglectful of their beards, differ little in appearance from the somewhat rough-and-tumble characters of the tramp service. To assume this external disguise successfully meant that the volunteers had also to change almost their personal characteristics as well as their clothes. Whereas the conspicuous traits of a naval man are neatness and order, these counterfeit merchant sailors had to train themselves in the casual ways of tramp seamen. They had also to accustom themselves to the conviction that a periscope was every moment searching their vessel from stem to stern in an attempt to discover whether there was anything suspicious about it; they therefore had not only to dress the part of merchantmen, but to act it, even in its minor details. The genius of Captain Campbell consisted in the fact that he had made a minute study of merchantmen, their officers and their crews, and was able to reproduce them so literally on this vessel that even the expert eye was deceived. Necessarily such a ship carried a larger crew than the merchant freighter; nearly all, however, were kept constantly concealed, the number appearing on deck always representing just about the same number as would normally have sailed upon a tramp steamer. These men had to train themselves in slouchiness of behaviour; they would hang over the rails, and even use merchant terms in conversation with one another ; the officers were "masters," "mates," "pursers," and the like, and their principal gathering-place was not a wardroom, but a saloon. That scrupulous deference with which a subordinate officer in the navy treats his superior was laid aside in this service. It was no longer the custom to salute before addressing the commander; more frequently the sailor would slouch up to his superior, his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth. This attempt to deceive the Hun observer at the periscope sometimes assumed an even more ludicrous form.