It would be no surprise to most of us if the strain of this constant danger and vigilance made its mark on these men, but all I know is that, when they arrive in Shanghai after weeks of this kind of thing, their appearance and conversation convey no hint that there is a war on at all If one dares to raise with them this tedious subject, one usually finds that they are the most incredible optimists, and that there is hardly a man on board who will not offer to prove, in eight different ways, that we cannot help winning this war within a fortnight.
Should you travel to England now, you will see little of all this. You may be in convoy, and you will think what a fine sight the ships of the convoy make on a fair morning, zig-zagging across the sea at regular intervals; your meals will be regular and as good as ever; the usual] sports will be arranged; you may suffer a little from the blackout; you may be called upon to do your bit as a volunteer look-out; and you may feel apprehensive of possible torpedoes, mines, etc; but unless you enquire deeply, you will get no conception of the work being done and the strain being incurred by those who are running the ship.
And when we talk of our merchant seamen and of those who are running our ships, we must never forget the men of those friendly countries who help to provide crews for our ships: men of countries which, politically and racially, have, on the surface, nothing to do with the war we are fighting. The ships of the Ocean line which my firm represents are to a very large extent manned by Chinese sailors and firemen, and I can truthfully say that none are keener or more careful than they in running a ship as it should be run, in war time or in peace. They scrupulously observe the blackout, they achieve a maxi mum of efficiency at boat drill, and they are fearless in action—in one ship which passed through Shanghai the other day, though not of the line to which I referred, I am told that there are two spare Chinese gun crews, which claim to be in every way as efficient as the ship's regular gun crew.
The Royal Navy is the sure shield of the British Empire, and the fleets of the Merchant Navy are the arteries through which the blood-stream of that Empire flows. None should know better than we, who live many thousands of miles from our homeland, what the Empire owes to all the men of Britain who go down to the sea in ships.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.