DEFAULTERS
By F. J. SALFELD
THE tall, muscular commander of a British warship was once seen running round his own quarter-deck with an undersized rating in pursuit, and the chase lasted until the seaman was restrained by his own messmates, who had been called up from below. The commander was not frightened of the man, whom he could have pushed ove: with one hand. Why then did he run away? He ran away to save the seaman from the serious offence of striking a superior officer. In this story, which is understood to be true, you have the kernel of the Royal Navy's extraordinarily human and humane attitude to crime and punishment. One of the- first things a junior officer learns is that the idea of having a wide table between him and a rating liable to violence is for the benefit of the rating. The table is not there to prevent the officer from receiving a black eye so much as to keep an excited man from the less immediate but more permanently distressing consequences of giving it. Moreover, it is officially laid down that patrols and escorts are always to include men below the rank of petty officer, " in order to remove from drunken men the opportunity to strike their superior officers."
Luckily, situations of this kind are rare in the Navy, which is remarkably free from crime. The average defaulters' parade is mostly occupied by nothing more serious than the overstaying of leave (only a few hours as a rule) and by minor slacknesses and negligence—small beer, if you will, but interesting to the officer of the watch if he is a student of psychology, at any rate until he is sufficiently senior to have heard the same stories infinitely retold. In a ship, men live in so close a community that they tend to view their fellows as specimens under a microscope. The pastime is absorbing.
Take, for instance, Able-Seaman Smith, first of the line of wooden- faced defaulters lined up on the quarter-deck this morning for preliminary investigation. The master-at-arms, or the regulating petty officer in a small ship, calls his name. You can see from the swagger of young Smith's gait as he marches up and stands in
front of you that he has an excellent opinion of himself. You know —though Smith may not know that you know—that he is an un- wearying pursuer of the local " parties "—i.e., girls. You also know that he is clever at his work and, if taken rightly, may some day make a good leading seaman or, if the war last long enough, petty officer. At the moment he is equally liable to become a first-class nuisance. He thinks he has you "weighed off." It doesn't occur to him that you may have him " weighed off."
The P.O. orders Smith to "off cap " and reads out the charge from his rough report-book. Smith, it seems, "did remain absent over leave" for two hours, namely, from 22.30, when he should have caught the liberty-boat at the pier, until 00.30, when he reported to the naval barracks ashore. You ask Smith what he has to say. Smith has a lot to say ; a long, circumstantial story of how he went to the next village, a few miles away, to visit some friends, who lent him a bicycle to ride back, and how the chain broke—" You can see me 'ands, sir, I can't get the grease out "—and so on. So far, fairly reasonable. Then a pause. Smith is a little out of breath. He has been watching you and thinks he will get away with it. So he cannot resist adding the little more that is too much. " As a matter of fact, sir, I did go down to the pier just in case" the liberty boat was late, sir."
It is time, to pounce. " What hour would that be? "
" Eleven o'clock, sir."
" Are you sure? "
Smith thinks the case clinched. " Absolutely positive, sir."
"Then why didn't you report to barracks, which are only a quarter of a mile away, until an hour and a half later? " Silence. The disconcerted Smith shifts his weight from one foot to the other. He hadn't thought as far as that. Excuse now lags hopelessly behind invention. He goes in the First Lieutenant's report. He will probably have some leave and possibly some pay stopped. The interruption of his love life will chasten him more than either of those losses.
Next to " off-cap " is Sick-Bay-Attendant Brown, who was absent from his place of duty in that he decided to stay ashore on Saturday night instead of returning to relieve his colleague of the afternoon. S.-B.-A. Brown is the confidential type. Such phrases as " I've done my best, sir," and " I've got the matter well in hand, sir," drip from his lips in a way designed to suggest extreme zeal. But in the present state of human nature excess of zeal is suspect. This time Brown is unlucky. A stoker had been taken ill and Brown's own colleague, expecting him back, had gone ashore.
Brown's story does him his usual self-credit. Far from seeking his own pleasure in the village, he had been investigating, in his own time, the question of some sports gear loaned for that after- noon's football match and not handed back. The time had flown so fast that when he came to think of returning on board, it was too late. Even so, he had thought of trying to have a signal made for a special boat. After this fluent apologia you expect to see a halo glowing about Brown's devoted head. Unfortunately, at the time he was supposed to be seeking the lost gear, Brown was seen at tea in a café with a Wren . . .
Ordinary-Seaman Robinson is a simpler type, but harder to deal with, since he is the sort who likes to nurse a grievance. He is alleged to have been guilty of an act to the prejudice of good order and naval discipline in that he failed to carry out an order to wash himself. You don't often meet this kind of offence. The standard of bodily cleanliness in the Navy is high, and dirty men have been known to receive forcible scrubbings from their shipmates. One is generally enough. Robinson's line is furious indignation. He not only washed himself when ordered ; he is always washing himself (except that morning, to judge from the state of his neck), and he can bring witnesses to prove he washed himself, and anybody who says he didn't is a — liar. At this point Robinson has to be warned that any further bad language will involve a second charge. He follows the others into the First Lieutenant's report. Junior officers may dismiss a charge if they do not find it sub- stantiated, but punishment is reserved for higher authority.
Often there is no guide to the truth of a story but your own estimate of a man's character. That is what gives the defaulter? parade its interest. The offences may be commonplace, but the view they present of human frailty and of curious quirks of make-up and impulse, though it may not often be inspiring, is certainly not dull. What you do admire and respect is the Navy's wise tolerance of folly where it does not affect discipline or efficiency. There is an established scale of punishments. An offender knows exactly what to expect if he takes a chance on being found out, and he rarely resents having an ingenious but fraudulent tale exposed. Both sides know the rules of the game, and those rules, as set out in King's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions, and distilling, as they do, the experience of centuries, are in their balance and common sense one of the wisest codes on earth.
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