Explore "The Navy Eternal" by Bartimeus on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
No propaganda poster artist with an eye to lurid backgrounds could have secured such an effect. Great buttresses of cloud, inky black with their burden of unshed snow, were banked about the sunset. The snow that had fallen during the past week rested like a shroud upon peak and headland, promontory and cliff-top, encircling the sombre waters of Ultima Thule with a dazzling white girdle. Against this background lay the Grand Fleet, an agglomeration of tripod masts and superimposed structures, as familiar a feature of the scene as the surf that broke endlessly about the cliffs, or the unappeased calling of the gulls. A little to the westward, however, where the cloud-masonry was split and reft by crimson shafts of light, an outstretched wing of the vast battle fleet struck an oddly unfamiliar note. Instead of the tripod masts and hooded control-tops, slender towers of latticed steel rose in pairs from each hull. Against the black clouds, every ensign in the fleet was clearly discernible; but it was not the White Ensign that showed up so vividly above the strangers. It was the "Stars and Stripes" painted with the glory of a northern winter sunset.
Only a few weeks had elapsed since they arrived, rust-streaked and travel-stained, as ships might well be that had battled through one winter gale after another from Chesapeake Bay to Ultima Thule; and at the sight of them the grey, war-weary battle fleet of Britain burst into a roar of welcome such as had never before greeted a stranger within its gates in either peace or war. For -- and herein lies the magic of the thing -- these were not merely allies swinging up on to the flank of a common battle-line, but kinsmen joining kinsmen as an integral part of one fleet. The rattle of their cables through the hawse pipes was drowned by the tumult of cheering, and forthwith the American Admiral dispatched a telegram to Washington, whose laconic business-like brevity alone did justice to what may prove the most significant message of history: "Arrived as per schedule," it said.