Merchantmen-at-arms : the British merchants' service in the war

Book excerpt: Written largely between the shipping crisis of 1917 and the surrender of German undersea arms at Harwich on November 20, 1918, this book is an effort to record a seaman's impressions of the trial through which the Merchants' Service has come in the war. It is necessarily halting and incomplete. The extent of the subject is perhaps beyond the safe traverse of a mariner's dead reckoning. Policies of governmental control and of the economics of our management do not come within the scope of the book except as text to the diary of seafaring. Out at sea, it is not easy to keep the right proportions in forming an opinion of measures devised on a grand scale, and of the operation of which we see only a small part. Our slender thread of communication with longshore happenings is often broken, and understanding is warped by conjecture. In pride of his ancient trade, the seaman may perceive importance and vital instrumentality in the ships and their voyages that may not be so evident to the landsman. By this is the mariner constantly impressed: that, without the merchant's enterprise on the sea—the adventure of his finance, his ships, his gear, his men—the armed and enlisted resources of the State could not have prevailed in averting disaster and defeat.