It is also
very proper: for it is good for a body of men conscious of a great
responsibility to feel themselves recognised, if only in that fallible,
imperfect and often irritating way in which recognition is sometimes
offered to the deserving.
But the Merchant Service had never to suffer from that sort of
irritation. No recognition was thrust on it offensively, and, truth to
say, it did not seem to concern itself unduly with the claims of its own
obscure merit. It had no consciousness. It had no words. It had no
time. To these busy men their work was but the ordinary labour of
earning a living; their duties in their ever-recurring round had, like
the sun itself, the commonness of daily things; their individual fidelity
was not so much united as merely co-ordinated by an aim that shone with
no spiritual lustre. They were everyday men. They were that, eminently.
When the great opportunity came to them to link arms in response to a
supreme call they received it with characteristic simplicity,
incorporating self-sacrifice into the texture of their common task, and,
as far as emotion went, framing the horror of mankind's catastrophic time
within the rigid rules of their professional conscience.
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