I have said that the North Sea was my finishing school of
seamanship before I launched myself on the wider oceans. Confined

as it is in comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt
globe, I did not know it in all its parts. My class-room was the

region of the English East Coast which, in the year of Peace with
Honour, had long forgotten the war episodes belonging to its

maritime history. It was a peaceful coast, agricultural,
industrial, the home of fishermen. At night the lights of its many

towns played on the clouds, or in clear weather lay still, here and
there, in brilliant pools above the ink-black outline of the land.

On many a night I have hauled at the braces under the shadow of
that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people on shore sleeping

quietly in their beds within sound of the sea. I imagine that not
one head on those envied pillows was made uneasy by the slightest

premonition of the realities of naval war the short lifetime of one
generation was to bring so close to their homes.

Though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing
a part of the North Sea much less known to me, I was deeply

conscious of the familiarity of my surroundings. It was a cloudy,
nasty day: and the aspects of Nature don't change, unless in the

course of thousands of years--or, perhaps, centuries. The
Phoenicians, its first discoverers, the Romans, the first imperial

rulers of that sea, had experienced days like this, so different in
the wintry quality of the light, even on a July afternoon, from

anything they had ever known in their native Mediterranean. For
myself, a very late comer into that sea, and its former pupil, I

accorded amused recognition to the characteristic" target="_blank" title="a.特有的 n.特性">characteristicaspect so well
remembered from my days of training. The same old thing. A grey-

green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white
foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently

made of wet blotting-paper. From time to time a flurry of fine
rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant

fishing boats, very few, very scattered, and tossing restlessly on
an ever dissolving, ever re-forming sky-line.

Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for
the emptiness of the decks, favouring my reminiscent mood. It

might have been a day of five and thirty years ago, when there were
on this and every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be

seen. Yet, thanks to the unchangeable sea I could have given
myself up to the illusion of a revised past, had it not been for

the periodicaltransit across my gaze of a German passenger. He
was marching round and round the boat deck with characteristic" target="_blank" title="a.特有的 n.特性">characteristic

determination. Two sturdy boys gambolled round him in his progress
like two disorderly satellites round their parent planet. He was

bringing them home, from their school in England, for their
holiday. What could have induced such a sound Teuton to entrust

his offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt,
rotten and criminal country I cannot imagine. It could hardly have

been from motives of economy. I did not speak to him. He trod the
deck of that decadent British ship with a scornful foot while his

breast (and to a large extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded
by the consciousness" target="_blank" title="n.意识；觉悟；知觉">consciousness of a superior destiny. Later I could observe

the same truculent bearing, touched with the racial grotesqueness,
in the men of the LANDWEHR corps, that passed through Cracow to

reinforce the Austrian army in Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the
haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably was, an

officer of the LANDWEHR; and perhaps those two fine active boys are
orphans by now. Thus things acquiresignificance by the lapse of

time. A citizen, a father, a warrior, a mote in the dust-cloud of
six million fighting particles, an unconsidered trifle for the jaws

of war, his humanity was not consciously impressed on my mind at
the time. Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels round

the corner of the deck-house, a white yachting cap and a green
overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting

cloud-horizon of the ashy-grey North Sea. He was but a shadowy
intrusion and a disregarded one, for, far away there to the West,

in the direction of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking
their daily bread and sometimes find their graves, I could behold

an experience of my own in the winter of '81, not of war, truly,
but of a fairly livelycontest with the elements which were very

angry indeed.
There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful

night--or a night of hate (it isn't for nothing that the North Sea
is also called the German Ocean)--when all the fury stored in its

heart seemed concentrated on one ship which could do no better than
float on her side in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and

altogether intolerable manner. There were on board, besides
myself, seventeen men all good and true, including a round enormous

Dutchman who, in those hours between sunset and sunrise, managed to
lose his blown-out appearance somehow, became as it were deflated,

and thereafter for a good long time moved in our midst wrinkled and
slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. The whimpering of

our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out of a
training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his

nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much
(before the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky

young ruffian), his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the
gusts of that black, savage night, was much more present to my mind

and indeed to my senses than the green overcoat and the white cap
of the German passenger circling the deck indefatigably, attended

by his two gyrating children.
"That's a very nice gentleman." This information, together with

the fact that he was a widower and a regular passenger twice a year
by the ship, was communicated to me suddenly by our captain. At

intervals through the day he would pop out of the chart-room and
offer me short snatches of conversation. He owned a simple soul

and a not very entertaining mind, and he was without malice and, I
believe, quite consciously" target="_blank" title="ad.无意识地；不觉察地">unconsciously, a warm Germanophil. And no wonder!

As he told me himself, he had been fifteen years on that run, and
spent almost as much of his life in Hamburg as in Harwich.

"Wonderful people they are," he repeated from time to time, without
entering into particulars, but with many nods of sagacious

obstinacy. What he knew of them, I suppose, were a few commercial
travellers and small merchants, most likely. But I had observed

long before that German genius has a hypnotising power over half-
baked souls and half-lighted minds. There is an immense force of

suggestion in highly organised mediocrity. Had it not hypnotised
half Europe? My man was very much under the spell of German

excellence. On the other hand, his contempt for France was equally
general and unbounded. I tried to advance some arguments against

this position, but I only succeeded in making him hostile. "I
believe you are a Frenchman yourself," he snarled at last, giving

me an intensely" target="_blank" title="ad.激烈地；热切地">intenselysuspicious look; and forthwith broke off
communications with a man of such unsound sympathies.

Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish
smudge of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any

change in their colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over
the North Sea. Black uninteresting hummocks of land appeared,

dotting the duskiness of water and clouds in the Eastern board:
tops of islands fringing the German shore. While I was looking at

their antics amongst the waves--and for all their solidity they
were very elusive things in the failing light--another passenger

came out on deck. This one wore a dark overcoat and a grey cap.
The yellow leather strap of his binocular case crossed his chest.

His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of short
white hairs, and the end of his nose was so perfectly round that it

determined the whole character of his physiognomy. Indeed nothing
else in it had the slightest chance to assert itself. His

disposition, unlike the widower's, appeared to be mild and humane.
He offered me the loan of his glasses. He had a wife and some

small children concealed in the depths of the ship, and he thought
they were very well where they were. His eldest son was about the

decks somewhere.
"We are Americans," he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar

tone. He spoke English with the accent of our captain's "wonderful
people," and proceeded to give me the history of the family's

crossing the Atlantic in a White Star liner. They remained in
England just the time necessary for a railway journey from

Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the depths of the ship)
were naturally a little tired.

At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to