‘Makes us awfully handy with our feet, said Twenty-One, mopping himself in the pauses of a waltz. ‘ Won’t you take a turn? No end good exercise.’
‘No, I’m afraid of the ladies,’ I replied.
‘They are rather solid,’ said Twenty-One reflectively, as a Post-Captain reversed on to his toes. ‘ My partner doesn’t protect me as a gentleman should. He threw me at a Paymaster just now.’
How in the course of their work they had saved up enough energy for this diversion was beyond me. They danced, fair heel and toe, unsparingly a couple of hours, for the sheer, downright exercise of it. And they were by no means all youths in the game either. We dropped panting into the boats, and saw behind us the whole gay show fade, flicker, and twinkle out. The Flagship had returned to her ordinary business. To-morrow she would take us back to Portland on our speed trials.
NO. 2 WELSH COAL
‘Isn’t it scandalous? Isn’t it perfectly damnable?’ said an officer after we had got under way, pointing to the foul, greasy columns of smoke that poured from every funnel. ‘Her Majesty’s Channel Squadron, if you please, under steam, burning horse-dung.’
Truthfully, it was a sickening sight. We could have been seen thirty miles off, a curtain of cloud, spangled and speckled with bits of burning rubbish and lumps of muck. The First Lieutenant looked at the beach of clinkers piling up on his hammock- nettings and blessed the Principality of Wales. The Chief Engineer merely said, ‘ You never know your luck in the Navy,’ put on his most ancient kit, and was no more seen in the likeness of a Christian man. Fate had hit him hard, for, just as his fires were at their pink of perfection, a battleship chose to get up her anchor by hand, delaying us an hour, and blackening the well-cherished furnaces. ‘No. 2 Welsh’ (this must have been an Admiralty jest) needs a lot of coaxing.
CHIMNEY-SWEEPS ON THE HIGH SEAS
But we were not quite such an exhibition as the Arrogant. She showed like chemical works in full blast as we swept out of Bantry and headed south for the Scillies. Then up came the Blake, a beautiful boat, giving easily to the swell that was lifting us already, and she dodged about left and right till we asked : ‘ What are you trying to do?’ ‘Trying to get out of your smoke,’ said she, vomiting cascades of her own the while. Meantime the Fleet- rams were doing their best to blind and poison us, and the battleships sagged away to leeward looking like wet ricks ablaze.
It was not the ignominy of the thing — the mere dirt and filth — that annoyed one so much as the thought that there was no power in the State which owes its existence to the Navy whereby a decent supply of State-owned, State-dug coal could be assured to us. There had been a strike, and while masters and men were argle-bargling ashore Her Majesty’s ships were masquerading in the guise of chimneysweeps on the high seas.
The delay, the disorder, the cruel extra work on stokers, not to mention the engineers, who at all times are worked pitilessly, is in Peace no more than merely brutal. In war it would be dangerous.
FOUR HOURS AT FULL SPEED
As if that were not enough, the swell that the battleships logged as light (Heaven forgive them!)
began to heave our starboard screw out of the water.
We raced and we raced and we raced, dizzily, thunderously, paralytically, hysterically, vibrating all down one side. It was, of course, in our four hours of full speed that the sea most delighted to lift us up on one finger and watch us kick. From 6 to 10 p.m. one screw twizzled for the most part in the circumambient ether, and the Chief Engineer — with coal-dust and oil driven under his skin — volunteered the information that life in his department was gay. He would have left a white mark on the Assistant-Engineer, whose work lay in the stokehold among a gang of new Irish stokers. Never but once have I been in our engine- rooms; and I dc not go again till I can take with me their designer for four hours at full speed. The place is a little cramped and close, as you might say. A steel guard, designed to protect men from a certain toothed wheel round the shaft, shore through its bolts and sat down, much as a mudguard sits down on a bicycle-wheel. But the wheel it sat on was also of steel; spinning one hundred and ninety revolutions per minute. So there were fireworks, beautiful but embarrassing, of incandescent steel sparks, surrounding the Assistant- Engineer as with an Aurora Borealis. They turned the hose on the display, and at last knocked the guard sideways, and it fell down somewhere under the shaft, so that they were at liberty to devote their attention to the starboard thrust-block, which was a trifle loose. Indeed, they had been trying to wedge the latter when the fireworks began — all up their backs.
The thing that consoled them was the thought that they had not slowed down one single turn.
THE NAVAL ENGINEER
‘She’s a giddy little thing,’ said the Chief Engineer. ‘ Come down and have a look.’
I declined in suitable language. Some day, when I know more, I will write about engine-rooms and stokers’ accommodation — the manners and customs of Naval Engineers and their artificers. They are an amazing breed, these quiet, rather pale men, in whose hands lie the strength and power of the ship.
‘Just think what they’ve got to stand up to,’ says Twenty-One, with the beautiful justice of youth. ‘ Of course, they are trained at Keyham and all that; but fancy doing your work with an eight-inch steam-pipe in the nape of your neck, an’ a dynamo buzzin’ up your back, an’ the whole blessed shoot whizzin’ round in the pit of your stomach! Then we jump about an’ curse if they don’t give us enough steam. I swear I think they’re no end good men in the engine room!’
If you doubt this, descend by the slippery steel ladders into the bluish copper-smelling haze of hurrying mechanism all crowded under the protective deck; crawl along the greasy foot-plates, and stand with your back against the lengthwise bulkhead that separates the desperately whirling twin engines. Wait under the low-browed supporting- columns till the roar and the quiver has soaked into every nerve of you; till your knees loosen and your heart begins to pump. Feel the floors lift below you to the jar and batter of the defrauded propeller as it draws out of its element. Try now to read the dizzying gauge-needles or find a meaning in the rumbled signals from the bridge. Creep into the stoke-hold — a boiler blistering either ear as you stoop — and taste what tinned air is like for a while. Face the intolerable white glare of the opened furnace doors; get into a bunker and see how they pass coal along and up and down; stand for five minutes with slice and ‘ devil’ to such labour as the stoker endures for four hours.
HIS HOURLY RISK
The gentleman with the little velvet slip between the gold rings on his sleeve does his unnoticed work among these things. If anything goes wrong, if he overlooks a subordinate’s error, he will not be wigged by the Admiral in God’s open air. The bill will be presented to him down here, under the two-inch steel deck, by the Power he has failed to control. He will be peeled, flayed, blinded, or boiled. That is his hourly risk. His duty shifts him from one ship to another, to good smooth and accessible engines, to vicious ones with a long record of deviltry, to lying engines that cannot do their work, to impostors with mysterious heart-breaking weaknesses, to new and untried gear fresh from the contractor’s hands, to boilers that will not make steam, to reducing-valves that will not reduce, and auxiliary engines for distilling or lighting that often give more trouble than the main concern. He must shift his methods for, and project himself into the soul of, each; humouring, adjusting, bullying, coaxing, refraining, risking, and daring as need arises.
Behind him is his own honour and reputation; the honour of his ship and her imperious demands; for there is no excuse in the Navy. If he fails in any one particular he severs just one nerve of the ship’s life. If he fails in all the ship dies — a prisoner to the set of the sea — a gift to the nearest enemy.
And, as I have seen him, he is infinitely patient, resourceful, and unhurried. However it might have been in the old days, when men clung obstinately to sticks and strings and cloths, the newer generation, bred to pole-
masts, know that he is the king-pin of their system. Our Assistant-Engineer had been with the engines from the beginning, and one night he told me their story, utterly unconscious that there was anything out of the way in the noble little tale
‘NO END GOOD MEN’
It was his business so to arrange that no single demand from the bridge should go unfulfilled for more than five seconds. To that ideal he toiled unsparingly with his Chief — a black sweating demon in his working hours, and a quiet student of professional papers in his scanty leisure.
‘An’ they come into the ward-room,’says Twenty- One, ‘ and you know they’ve been having a young hell of a time down below, but they never growl at us or get stuffy or anything. No end good men, I swear they are.’
‘Thank you, Twenty-One,’ I said. ‘I’ll let that stand for the whole Navy if you don’t mind ‘
A HISTORY OF ENGLAND
By Rudyard Kipling and C.R.L.Fletcher
Intended as a school text book, Kipling contributed twenty-two original poems to this volume. The book was published in July 1911 in two different formats. One was large and lavishly laid out and priced expensively, while the other was small and relatively cheap, with the different title A School History of England. The relative importance attached by Fletcher and Kipling to the two books can be seen from the initial print runs. Only 5000 copies of the expensive A History of England were printed, compared to 25,000 copies of the cheaper version which was intended for schools. It is believed that the purpose of the text book was to persuade children to Fletcher’s particular view of England’s historical development and Kipling’s poems clearly support that view. The whole text of the expensive version, with the original colour illustrations, are provided in this edition.
A HISTORY OF ENGLAND
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
FROM THE EARLIEST TIME TO THE DEPARTURE OF THE ROMANS
CHAPTER II
SAXON ENGLAND
CHAPTER III
THE NORMAN KINGS 1066-1154
CHAPTER IV
HENRY II TO HENRY III, 1154-1272: THE BEGINNINGS OF PARLIAMENT
CHAPTER V
THE THREE EDWARDS, 1272 — 1377
CHAPTER VI
THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES; RICHARD II TO RICHARD III, 1377-1485.
CHAPTER VII
THE TUDORS AND THE AWAKENING OF ENGLAND, 1485 — 1603
CHAPTER VIII
THE EARLY STUARTS AND THE GREAT CIVIL WAR, 1603-60
CHAPTER IX
THE FALL OF THE STUARTS AND THE REVOLUTION, 1660-1688
CHAPTER X
WILLIAM III TO GEORGE II 1688-1760; THE GROWTH OF EMPIRE
CHAPTER XI
THE AMERICAN REBELLION AND THE GREAT FRENCH WAR 1760-1815; REIGN OF GEORGE III
CHAPTER XII
GEORGE III TO GEORGE V, 1815-1911
CHAPTER I
FROM THE EARLIEST TIME TO THE DEPARTURE OF THE ROMANS
The River’s Tale
Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew
Wanted to know what the River knew,
For they were young and the Thames was old,
And this is the tale that the River told:
I walk my beat before London Town,
Five hours up and seven down.
Up I go and I end my run
At Tide-end-town, which is Teddington.
Down I come with the mud in my hands
And plaster it over the Maplin Sands.
But I’d have you know that these waters of mine
Were once a branch of the River Rhine,
When hundreds of miles to the east I went
And England was joined to the Continent.
I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds,
The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds,
And the giant tigers that stalked them down
Through Regent’s Park into Camden Town.
And I remember like yesterday
The earliest Cockney who came my way
When he pushed through the forest that
lined the Strand,
With paint on his face and a club in his hand.
He was death to feather and fin and fur,
He trapped my beavers at Westminster,
He netted my salmon, he hunted my deer,
He killed my herons off Lambeth Pier;
He fought his neighbour with axes and swords,
Flint or bronze, at my upper fords.
While down at Greenwich for slaves and tin
The tall Phoenician ships stole in,
And North Sea war-boats, painted and gay,
Flashed like dragon-flies Erith way;
And Norseman and Negro and Gaul
and Greek.
Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek,
And life was gay, and the world was new,
And I was a mile across at Kew!
But the Roman came with a heavy hand,
And bridged and roaded and ruled the land,
And the Roman left and the Danes blew in —
And that’s where your history books begin!
This is to be a short history of all the people who have lived in the British Islands. I have just counted up over a hundred of these islands on the map, some of them mere rocks, some as big as small counties; besides England with Scotland, and Ireland. But when first there were men in Britain it was not a group of islands, but one stretch of land joining the great continent of Europe, which then reached out into the Atlantic Ocean more than fifty miles west of Ireland. The English Channel, the North Sea, and the Irish Sea were then land through which ran huge European rivers.
The land was covered with forests and swamps and full of wild beasts, some of which have now vanished from the earth, while others, such as the tiger and the elephant, have gone to warmer climates. As for wolves, the land was alive with them. Indeed, the last wolf in Scotland was killed only 240 years ago; the
last in Ireland about 180 years ago. The beaver was one of the commonest animals of those early times, and perhaps helped to make our flat meadows by the dams he built across the streams.
But we know almost nothing about the first men who lived here, except that they were naked and very hairy; they slept in trees and lived on raw flesh or fruit, or dug for roots with crooked branches. After a long while, probably thousands of years, the climate got gradually colder, and great sheets of ice covered all Northern Europe. Then these first men either died out or went away southward.
Again thousands of years passed, and the west end of Europe got freed of ice and sank several hundred feet, and the sea flooded over the lower parts. So Britain became an island or a group of islands.
Then the second race of men came, perhaps in some kind of boats made of skins stretched over bent poles. About this race we do know something. They were jolly, cunning, dark little fellows with long black hair. At first they lived high up on the hills, so that they could see their enemies from a distance. They could cook food, they dug out caves to live in, they made arrows and axes of sharp stones,
and so stood a very fair chance of fighting the wild beasts. Their brains, though perhaps small compared to ours, were worth all the strength of all the beasts that ever howled at night. No doubt they had still something of the beast in them; they could run very swiftly;could climb trees like monkeys; could smell their enemies and their prey far off. They grew up early and died young. Most of their children died in infancy. They clothed themselves in skins, and at first lived entirely by hunting and fishing. Their whole time was devoted to getting food for themselves and their families. But just think what a lot of things they had to make for themselves. How long it must have taken to polish a piece of flint until it was sharp enough to cut down a tree or to cut up a tough old wolf! How long to make a fish-hook or a needle of bone! How clever and hard-working these men must have been! No doubt there were a few sneaks and lazy wretches then, as there are now, who tried to beg from other people instead of fighting for themselves an
d their wives. But I fancy such fellows had a worse time of it then than they have now. A man who wouldn’t work very soon died.
No doubt there were holidays, too, after a successful hunt; or long lazy summer days, when it was too hot to go out after deer orbison, and when even the women laid aside their everlasting skin-stitching and told each other stories of their babies; and the babies toddled about after butterflies, larger and brighter than the peacocks and tortoise shells of to-day. I don’t suppose that these men thought of Britain as their “country”; but they thought of their family or their tribe as something sacred, for which they would fight and die; and the spirit of the good land took hold of them, the smell of the good damp motherearth, the hum of the wild bees, the rustle of heather and murmur of fern; they made rude songs about it, and carved pictures of their fights on the shoulder-blades of the beasts they had killed. As time went on they grew still more cunning, and began to tame the young of some of the beasts, such as puppies,
lambs, calves and kids; and they found out the delights of a good drink of milk. And so to the hunting trade they added the shepherd’s trade, which is a much more paying one.
Then some wonderful fellow discovered how to sow seeds of wheat, or some other corn;
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 825