Brown on Resolution quotes

His feet, too, although a few fragments of what were once shoes still clung to them, were horribly swollen and bruised and cut. They were more like sodden lumps of raw horseflesh than human feet.

Not the cruellest human being on earth could have contemplated those dreadful feet without a throb of pity.

Yet a very cursory inspection of Albert Brown’s dying body would be enough to show that he was not dying because of the biting flies, nor even because of the hideous condition of his feet.

But, still, Agatha felt strangely lighthearted as she walked to the station; she hummed a little song; and then she found herself in the same carriage as Lieut.-Commander R. E. S. Saville-Samarez.

She liked him, at first sight, and at first sight she knew him for what he was, a naval officer of the best brand of British stupidity.

She liked his good clothes and his smooth cheeks (Agatha, as she regarded these last, felt a revulsion of feeling against the fashionable hairiness of 1893) and the way he blushed when she caught him looking at her.

So that her wordless consent to Samarez’s fierce suggestion, and her acquiescence when Samarez leaned out of the window and redirected the cabman, were absolutely inexcusable, so her fellow-workers would think.

But her fellow-workers had never known, perhaps would never know, the careless, happy stupefaction of sudden passion.

The hotel porter was discreet; the hotel reception clerk was friendly;

Truth to tell, the waste of money and time, by the end of the five days, had so worked upon Agatha’s mind that she was quite glad of the prospect of returning home to economical housekeeping and domestic industry.

And Samarez had begun to cease to interest her⁠—he was not a tremendously interesting fellow, as a matter of fact.

Yet the parting was painful. Samarez did not want her to go; he clung to her as they kissed goodbye in the hotel bedroom, with his hand to her breast.

… baby boy would suddenly decide that big sisters were no longer of use to him and would find his own way to school, not quite sure of himself either, with an occasional look round to see that the sister was not unattainably out of reach.

Agatha could not have watched with greater interest the beginning of a new planet.

Some there were to whom the grim flagstones of the pavement were friendly and sociable, for it was a great game to walk to school entirely on the lines between them; and just outside No.

It was not long before Agatha had quite a developed knowledge of armaments and tonnages and displacements. She could read about protective decks without bewilderment; she could even follow arguments on the burning question of “Should Armoured Cruisers take their Place in the Line?”

It was an extraordinary hobby for a woman to take up; but no one ever dare predict in what direction a woman cut off and isolated from the world will expend her energies.

The Library found all sorts of books on its shelves to interest Agatha; she had no use for fiction of course, as became her upbringing, and she read Lives of various admirals, and Naval Histories, and the Letters of Lord Nelson.

Agatha believed that self-sacrifice was the primary duty of mankind; that man (and much more so woman) was born to sorrow; and that she should give up her child seemed to her right and proper, especially if the Navy benefited.

The British Navy was to her the noblest creation in the world; it was the outward and visible manifestation of the majesty of God.

Mr. Deane sighed incredulously and impatiently; he had been brought up in a world where women never had any ideas of their own and never, never dreamed of acting contrary to masculine advice.

and that she should give up her child seemed to her right and proper, especially if the Navy benefited. The British Navy was to her the noblest creation in the world; it was the outward and visible manifestation of the majesty of God.

Mr. Deane sighed incredulously and impatiently; he had been brought up in a world where women never had any ideas of their own and never, never dreamed of acting contrary to masculine advice.

Perhaps it was this impatience of his which impelled him along the steep and slippery road on which his footsteps were even then straying.

A board school education was of course all his mother could afford for him, but a board school education backed up by strong home influence will do as much for any boy up to eleven years of age as any other form of education.

Agatha had been taught at a young ladies’ college, but her sound common sense and mighty will enabled her to recover from this catastrophe.

So that even while Agatha was entering upon the study of the higher aspects of Sea Power and gaining a blurred insight into the ballistics of big gunnery she was at the same time helping Albert with his sums and beginning his first tentative introduction …

They chatted amicably enough for quite a while before at last Mr. Gold took himself off after having begged permission to come again, and Agatha at his departure found herself almost dreamy.

Queenly she was, but she was of that type of queen which inclines towards a Prince Consort.

Mr. Gold’s personified inadequacy made a very definite appeal to her. Why, he was almost shorter than her; she could pick him up and carry him if she wanted to.

So years followed years, and each succeeding year dragged more heavily and more painfully than did the one before. To Agatha’s tortured conscience it seemed as if retribution was being exacted from her for her vile sin.

To her it was natural that a lifetime of pain and squalor should be the consequence of a five days’ madness.

Fine sewing sank steadily in value; private customers fell away—the economic causes of a falling birthrate and marriage-rate broke her on their wheel.

To Agatha’s tortured conscience it seemed as if retribution was being exacted from her for her vile sin. To her it was natural that a lifetime of pain and squalor should be the consequence of a five days’ madness.

Fine sewing sank steadily in value; private customers fell away⁠—the economic causes of a falling birthrate and marriage-rate broke her on their wheel.

There was not so much demand nowadays for baby clothes or wedding dresses, and simplicity was creeping into fashion even in such garments as were ordered of her.

The office entirely agreed with him.

Only boys who were suffering from an overdose of penny dreadfuls would ever dream of leaving the sequestered calm of an office for the uncertain turbulence of a fighting service⁠—and they would not do more than dream of it.

As for acting upon the dream, throwing up a safe job for a trifling whim, that was sheer lunacy. The Junior Partner himself saw fit to emerge from his Olympian seclusion and to discuss the matter with this extraordinary office boy;

Ziethen, an earlier and smaller armoured cruiser, would have hardly more difficulty. Brown even foresaw serious danger in an encounter with a light cruiser, with Emden or Dresden, with their smaller but more modern and dangerous guns.

But Brown had the better kind of courage; he could foresee danger and not flinch, not even inwardly.

If death came to him—well, he died, and that was the end of speculation. If not—wartime and an expanding Navy meant promotion. He was Leading Seaman now, though barely twenty.

Brown even foresaw serious danger in an encounter with a light cruiser, with Emden or Dresden, with their smaller but more modern and dangerous guns. But Brown had the better kind of courage; he could foresee danger and not flinch, not even inwardly.

If death came to him⁠—well, he died, and that was the end of speculation.

If not—wartime and an expanding Navy meant promotion. He was Leading Seaman now, though barely twenty. The commission he hardly dared to think about seemed at last a faint possibility instead of an incredible possibility.

He put his helm over too, and Ziethen came round until the courses of the two ships were almost parallel, and, as Charybdis turned further, he continued his turn until it almost seemed as if he were running away.

It was a pretty sight, those two great ships wheeling round each other on the blue, blue Pacific with a blue sky over them and peace all about them.

Only the spread smudges from the heavily smoking funnels marred the picture.

Her guns still spoke spasmodically through the smoke; the White Ensign still flew overhead, challenging the interloping Black Cross on a white ground which flaunted itself from Ziethen.

When the oldest navy met the newest, pride left no room for surrender; barbaric victory or barbaric death were the only chances open to the iron men in their iron ships.

Feebly spoke Charybdis’ guns, and for every single shell which was flung at Ziethen a full salvo came winging back, five shells at a time, directed by an uninjured central control, with the range known to a yard.

It would be a distortion of English to say that Brown had a cool head; at the moment he was a mere incarnation of duty, selfless and unselfish and impersonal, so that coolness of head had nothing to do with his condition.

He was a fighting machine, and as little likely to become flustered as any other machine.

Outside it was tropically dark; the young moon had not quite cleared the highest ridge of Resolution, to light the lagoon and the ship within. Brown lifted the full set of equipment, put it over his shoulders, and buckled it about him.

Once let him fire and kill one of Ziethen’s crew, and all the hundreds of German sailors on board would become his sworn enemies, and might hound him down to his death.

Death lay on the one hand, and liberty on the other; it was a momentous choice and one over which Brown might have hesitated.

He did not hesitate at all; he did not even think about the choice. He had made up his mind last night, and when a man like Brown makes up his mind there is no room left for hesitation.

But here began the second lesson.

No one who had not attempted it could realize that the word “rush” had no place in the vocabulary of Resolution.

The dreadful razor-edged blocks of lava and the clustered clinging cacti made anything like rapid progress impossible. An active man could move about on Resolution as fast as a snail in a garden, as Brown had discovered the night before.

Already one bottle was half empty, however, and Brown refused to allow himself anything approaching indulgence in the warm, metal-flavoured fluid. He sternly thrust back the cork and buckled the bottles to his belt.

Small beauty is there in war⁠—no one could find beauty in the tumbled bodies of the dead down below or in the tortured wounded calling feebly for water on the scorching rocks. But beauty could be found in that gesture of Brown’s; one lone man⁠—boy, rather⁠—unwatched, unordered, putting aside the drink he craved at the call of what he considered his duty.

He set his small white teeth while the sweat ran down his face and caked the streaked lava dust which grimed it, his rifle ever to his hand, suffering and enduring without regret or hesitation.

He had done all he could at present, all the same. With dogged determination he lay upon his ledge of rock waiting for night—or for the firing from the crest which would presage his death.

There is a sublime, hard satisfaction in awaiting death when one has done all that could be done to avert it.

Brown knew that satisfaction, even while he kept the cruiser under patient observation lest any further opportunity should display itself.

His rifle and ammunition, too, were serious hindrances to his progress, and the sweat poured off him and his face was distorted with strain at each heartbreaking struggle.

Both his feet and his hands left bloody imprints upon the rock where they touched it.

Yet he struggled on, upwards and sideways, to where in the faint light he thought he could make out a shallow vertical cleft in the cliff face which might be suitable for his purpose.

He actually, although he did not know it, hit one or two men, and his misses were quite efficacious also, in that they scared into jumpiness the men they did not hit.

The moment when a ten-ton steel plate is swinging in tackles is a bad moment to be shot at.

The killings and the wounds and the interruption roused Ziethen to a pitch of fury previously unreached. Those on board were maddened by the deaths of their friends, and they were furiously angry with the landing party, who had so absurdly failed in its mission.

He knew that Fate was close upon him as he looked along the rifle barrel and saw the foresight dancing like a live thing in the U of the backsight, and as shot after shot went wide.

But the rifle is a sweet tool, and gives of its best even in bungling hands as far as in it lies.

Twice Brown loosed off, almost by accident, at the right moment, and each time a man in one of the boats collapsed upon his thwart. Two casualties could not stop the boats.

For some minutes the attackers hesitated.

It was hard to go back when success was so close at hand.

But the siren brayed again, and the semaphore gesticulated feverishly. No one could act in independence of orders so definite and so oft repeated.

Water! Of course it was water for which he was asking.

No one would dream of asking for anything else; there was nothing else in all this world one-millionth part as valuable as water.

The heartbroken cries of the German boy echoed in Brown’s ears with pathetic persistence; he heard them so long that he felt he must rouse himself to satisfy them. Once he had made up his mind to the effort it was easy enough.

He knew nothing of the grim majesty of Lear nor of the sunny happiness of Twelfth Night. Good food and good wine and the glory of Rembrandt had alike passed him by.

Never even had he known liberty; he had been all his life the slave either of a mother’s ambition or of a Navy which demands her servitors’ all to bestow upon unthinking ingrates.

All his happiness, all his talents, his life itself, had been swept away in the tide of the Iron Age, the Age of the Twelve-Inch Gun. The achievements of Brown at twenty embraced nothing older than death and destruction.

Nelson once wrote that five minutes makes the difference between victory and defeat.

It was hardly more than five minutes which made the difference between the detection of Ziethen and her possible escape from observation.