Brown on Resolution by C.S. Forester — Read

The record of Brown's doings while Charybdis fought Ziethen is not material to this history. He was only a part of a whole, and whatever he did the credit belongs not to him, but to the Navy, the tremendous institution which had trained him and disciplined him. If in the last few desperate moments he fought his gun without superior direction, that was because handling a 4.7 under all conditions had been grained into his nature; the credit should rather go to the whiskered admirals of an earlier epoch who had laid down the instructions for gun drill. Brown was a brave man, and he did not flinch from his post, but many men less brave than he would have done the same had they been parts of the same whole. It was the Navy of the unrivalled past which gained glory from the defeat of this, an inconsiderable fraction of itself, just as that same Navy must bear the blame, if blame there is. That is as it should be, but at the same time the argument hands over to Brown all the glory and honour for what he did on Resolution, and to Brown as an individual must be given the credit for the eventual destruction of Ziethen. For he acted on Resolution without orders, on his own keen initiative, under conditions where neither discipline nor training could help him.

That was all still in the future, however, and not one of the German boat's crew which picked him up as they pulled through the scattered wreckage knew that they would soon meet their deaths through the agency of this shaken fragment of humanity. Very thoroughly did the boat's crew search, rowing hither and yon over the oil-streaked water, but they found little. There were two dead men -- one of them so shattered that he hardly appeared human -- two or three wounded, and one merely half-stunned; this last was a stoutly-built fellow of medium height, very freckled, with hard grey eyes and light-brown hair, inclined to be as rebellious as was possible within the narrow limits of its close crop. He was very badly shaken, having been blown from the deck to the water when the magazine exploded, and he was hardly conscious of holding on to a stray rolled hammock which came to the surface providentially near him when Charybdis sank. He lay limp in the bottom of the boat as it rowed back to Ziethen, and he had to be assisted to the ship's deck.