Introduction
The following installment of Arthur Machen’s book review series focuses on recently published volumes concerning the Great War, which had ended less than six months earlier. At this time, this type of book succeeded as part of a post-war boom market. Some of the aspects that Machen reports on are historically fascinating, while other bits seem to be simply winner’s braggadocio. A few months later, one author discussed here, Sidney A. Moseley, does not fare so well from Machen’s pen, as we will see next week.
Gossips About Books and Authors
by
Arthur Machen
May 19, 1919
There is one very grave mistake in “Pushing Water,” by R. N. V. (Lane 4s. net), and that mistake is in the first sentence of the first page. R. N. V. writes:–
We are known by all kinds of names, from Harry Tate’s Navy (a comedian whose chief wit lies in the contortions performed by his whiskers) to our official name, the Auxiliary Motor Boat Patrol.
The remark shows that the author knows nothing about Mr. Harry Tate, but he clearly knows a great deal about other things, and chiefly about the great battle that was being fought all through the war upon the seas; a battle waged by all manner of queer ships, in addition to the Dreadnoughts and destroyers, the battle-cruisers and submarines.
Among other things, I think that R. N. V. knows a good deal about the psychology of Sinn Fein. He met, somewhere on the Galway coast, a police-sergeant who got tired of arresting the “rebels” who paraded regularly in front of the barracks. The Sinn Feiners got into the habit of the thing, and used to come and ask him, in a friendly way, when the next arrests were to be made. So at the next rebel parade the sergeant strolled over and watched the drill critically.
“Bhoys,” he said, “I am an old soldier myself, and I could give you a few wrinkles in drill.” The Sinn Fein army accepted his offer, and for two Sundays he “Drilled the hell out of them”– to use his own idiom. On the third Sunday there was no rebel army: it had got tired.
“Food from the Deep,” is an entertaining chapter in Sydney A. Moseley’s “The Fleet from Within” (Sampson Low). To read it makes one wonder whether the nation of malignant fools who thought England decadent, helpless, an easy prey, will spend the next hundred years or so in meditating over their folly, and in pondering the disadvantages of being very clever, but not clever enough.
For we not only fought the German submarine and beat it; we salvaged cargoes which had been torpedoed to the bottom of the seas. The author gives a most curious account of the method of the “grab” which brought up a ton of grain from the sunken ship with every clutch. This operation, the salvaging of immersed grain, “had never been thought of before.” It was, happily, the ruin of the Germans that we contrived to think of many things which had never been thought of before.
More yarns of the fight on the seas in “Sea-Hounds” by Lewis Freeman (Cassell, 6s. net). I note especially the chapter called “2,” which tells of the adventures of a yacht, captained by an American volunteer from the Middle West.
The American carried the art of disguise to its extremist limit. He was not content with a scheme for painting which turned a smart pleasure yacht into a thing which was sometimes like a derelict fishing boat, sometimes like a ferry boat blown out to sea, sometimes like a timber pile. The ingenious, skipper went further; he rigged a movable sky which made his boat, seen through a periscope, look as if it was going the way it wasn’t going.
This was not a success; there were mechanical difficulties. But the baby boy, thrown by the despairing father to the kind Germans on the submarine, did better. The kind Germans, it should be explained, were just about to bomb and sink what they believed to be a harmless pleasure yacht.
The “baby boy” was a device full of the worst sort of explosive, which ripped open the submarine and sent her to destruction.
The Weekly Machen
Previous: Gossip About Books and Authors (7/13/1918)
Next: Gossip About Books and Authors (7/1/1919)
darklybrightpress.com 
Thanks for this Naval/sea-going warfare selection! I wonder if the UK edition of Pushing Water was ‘anonymized’ for some reason, as the American edition you link (of which the Internet Archive has two scans) tells us the author’s name and describes him on the cover as “Lt. R.N.V.R.” and the title-page as “Lieutenant, R.N.V.R.” – Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Funnily enough, when I tried the WorldCat for “R.N.V.” I got Hounding the Hun from the Seas by “Lieutenant M-P-S (R.N.V.R.)” with a link to a scan of the Harvard copy of this richly-illustrated short book, bearing on the title-page “With notes from and gratitude to Lieutenant E. P. Dawson’s […] book”!
I look forward to more from Machen about Sydney A. Moseley, having seen the lively Wikipedia article you link!
LikeLike