Brown on Resolution by C.S. Forester — Read

Captain Richard E. S. Saville-Samarez, C. B., M. V. O., sat alone in his cabin at his desk pondering the problems set before him by the terse Admiralty instructions received by wireless and cable, by the small Pacific chart before him bearing the estimated positions of von Spee and his squadron, and by the various possibilities which had gradually accumulated in his not highly imaginative brain. Of a surety his passage of the Panama Canal in H. M. S. Leopard with Penzance in company had caused very considerable stir. The Canal authorities had been dubious enough about letting him through, despite the fact that His Britannic Majesty's representative on the spot had made preparations for his arrival twenty-four hours before, quoting terms and treaties which declared the Canal open to all shipping whether in peace or war. Cables everywhere had been alive with the news when he entered the Canal; excited American papers would on the morrow be informing their readers that at last the British Navy had shown a sign of life instead of leaving hapless squadrons to be exterminated by von Spee. Already Leopard's presence would be notified to Berlin, and German diplomatists would protest the while the German Admiralty noted the information and weighed anxiously the effect of this slight dispersion upon the crushing superiority of the Grand Fleet at Scapa, where thirty Dreadnoughts awaited the emerging of the High Sea Fleet from its minefields and protected harbours.

Captain Saville-Samarez was not very different in appearance from what he had been twenty years before; he was not of the type that alters greatly with age. There were grey hairs now among his irrepressible brown ones, and authority and responsibility had brought character into his face; there were two firm vertical lines between his eyebrows, and his eyes seemed deeper set, and there was a grim line or two about his mouth, but he still seemed extraordinarily young, with his fresh complexion and upright carriage. Truth to tell, responsibility and authority sat lightly on his shoulders; he was never a man for deep thought or of much imagination, and the steadiness of his nerve had brought him out of whatever difficulties he had found himself in without any ageing flurry or worry. Little jobs like picking up moorings in a twenty-thousand-ton battleship in a crowded harbour with a full gale blowing he had simply accepted and carried through with automatically-acquired skill, and without any frightening pictures of what might happen if he made a mistake.