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Muirhead Bone, from Merchantmen-at-Arms (1919)
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THIS IS a large post, but deservedly so. It is a lengthy portion of a book (available in full online) by David W. Bone, titled Merchantmen-at-Arms: The British Merchants' Service in the War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1919). The author was one of three brothers from an extraordinary family of Scottish writers and artists. David William Bone was born in 1873. His father was a prominent Glasgow journalist, as was his older brother, James Bone, who was the London editor of the Manchester Guardian for more than thirty years. A younger brother (oddly, also named David) was Sir (David) Muirhead Bone, who, during World War I, was the country's first official war artist, a position he returned to during World War II. David W. Bone, who wrote the astonishing passages here, commanded British merchant ships. His brother Muirhead provided the illustrations for the book, three of which are published here. The excerpted text below is from an especially wonderful chapter called "On Camouflage—And Ships' Names" (the concluding paragraphs on naming ships, omitted here, are especially hilarious). It provides an engaging narrative of the development of WWI British naval camouflage, one that differs considerably from the standard widely-touted views. Undoubtedly it has to be one of the most vivid descriptions of dazzle camouflage by someone who actually witnessed its use. Here it is—
[Partly in response to the sinking of the British ocean liner the RMS Lusitania by a German U-boat in May 1915, British merchant ship commanders] set about to make
our vessels less conspicuous. Gray! We painted our hulls and funnels gray. In
many colors of gray. The nuances of our coatings were accidental. Poor quality
paint and variable untimely mixings contributed, but it was mainly by crew
troubles (deficiency and incapacity) that we came by our first camouflage. As
needs must, we painted sections at a time—a patch here, a plate or two
there—laid on in the way that real sailors would call "inside-out"! We sported
suits of many colors, an infinite variety of shades. Quite suddenly we realized
that gray, in such an ample range—red-grays, blue-grays, brown-grays,
green-grays—intermixed on our hulls, gave an excellent low-visibility color
that blended into the misty northern landscape.
Bolshevik now in our
methods, we worked on other schemes to trick the murderer's eye. Convention
again beset our path. The great god Symmetry—whom we had worshipped to our
undoing—was torn from his high place. The glamour of Balances, that we had thought so fine and ship shape, fell
from our eyes, and we saw treachery in every regular disposition. Pairs—in masts,
ventilators, rails and stanchions, boat-groupings, samson posts, even in the
shrouds and rigging—were spies to the enemy, and we rearranged and screened and
altered as best we could, in every way that would serve to give a false
indication of our course and speed.
Freighters and colliers (that we had scorned because of ugly forward rake of
mast and funnel) became the leaders of our fashion. We wedged our masts forward
(where we could) and slung a gaff on the fore side of the foremast; we planked
the funnel to look more or less upright; we painted a curling bow wash over the
propeller and a black elaborate stern on the bows. We trimmed our ships by the
head, and flattered ourselves that, Janus-like, we were heading all ways!
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| Muirhead Bone, from Merchantmen-at-Arms (1919) |
Few, including the
enemy, were greatly deceived. At that point where alterations of apparent course were important—to
put the putting Fritz off his stroke—the deck-houses and erections with their
beam-wise fronts or ends would be plainly noted, and a true line of course be
readily deduced. With all our new zeal, we stopped short of altering standing
structures, but we could paint, and we made efforts to shield our weakness by
varied applications. Our device was old enough, a return to the checker of
ancient sea-forts and the line of painted gun-ports with which we used to decorate
our clipper sailing ships. (That also was a
camouflage of its day—an effort to overawe Chinese and Malay pirates by
the painted resemblance to the gun-deck
of a frigate.) We saw the eye-disturbing value of a bold crisscross, and those
of us who had paint to spare made a "Hobson-jobson" of awning spars and
transverse bulkheads.
These were our
sea-efforts—rude trials effected with great difficulty in the stress of the new sea-warfare. We could only
see ourselves from a surface point of view, and, in our empirics, we had no
official assistance. During our brief stay in port it was impossible to procure
day-laboring gangs—even the "gulls" of the dockside were busy at sea. On a
voyage, gun crews and extra look-outs left few hands of the watch available for
experiments; in any case, our rationed paint covered little more than would
keep the rust in check. We were relieved when new stars of marine coloration
arose, competent shore concerns that, on Government instruction, arrayed us in
a novel war paint. Our rough and amateurish tricks gave way to the ordered
schemes of the dockyard; our ships were
armed for us in a protective coat of many colors.
Upon us like an
avalanche came this real camouflage. Somewhere behind it all a genius of
pantomimic transformation blazed his rainbow wand and fixed us. As we came in
from sea, dazzle-painters swarmed on us, bespattered creatures with no bowels
of compassion, who painted over our cherished glass and teak-wood and brass
port-rims—the last lingering evidences of our gentility. Hourly we watched our
trim ships take on the hues of a swingman's roundabouts. We learned of fancy colors
known only in high art—alizarin and gray-pink, purple-lake and Hooker's green.
The designs of our mantling held us in a maze of expectation. Bends and
ecarteles, indents and rayons, gyrony and counter Flory, appeared on our
topsides; curves and arrowheads were figured on boats and davits and deck fittings;
apparently senseless dabs and patches were measured and imprinted on funnel
curve and rounding of the ventilators; inboard and outboard we were streaked
and crossed and curved.
With our arming of guns
there was need for instruction in their service and maintenance; artificial
smoke-screens required that we should be efficient in their use; our Otters
called for some measure of seamanship in adjustment and control. So far all
governmental appliances for our defense relied on our understanding and
operation, but this new protective coloration, held aloof from our confidence,
it was quite self-contained, there was no rule to be learnt; we were to be
shipmates with a new contrivance, to the operation of which we had no control.
For want of point in discussion, we criticized freely. We surpassed ourselves in adjectival review; we
stared in horror and amazement as each
newly bedizened vessel passed down the river. In comparison and simile we racked memory for text to the gaudy
creations. "Water running under a bridge."…”Forced draught on a
woolly sheep's back."…”Mural decoration in a busy butcher's shop."…”Strike
me a rosy bloody pink!" said one
of the hands, "if this 'ere don't remind me o' jaundice an' malaria an' a
touch o' th' sun, an' me in a perishin' dago 'orspittel!"
While naming the new
riot of color grotesque—a monstrosity, an outrage, myopic madness—we were ready
enough to grasp at anything that might help us in the fight at sea. We scanned
our ships from all points and angles to unveil the hidden imposition. Fervently
we hoped that there would be more in it than met our eye—that our preposterous
livery was not only an effort to make Gargantuan faces at the Boche! Only the
most splendid results could justify our bewilderment.
Out on the sea we came
to a better estimate of the value of our novel war-paint. In certain lights and
positions we seemed to be steering odd courses—it was very difficult to tell
accurately the line of a vessel's progress. The low visibility that we seamen
had sought was sacrificed to enhance a bold disruption of perspective. While
our efforts at deception, based more or less on a one-color scheme of greys,
may have rendered our ships less visible against certain favoring backgrounds
of sea and sky, there were other weather conditions in which we would stand out
sharply revealed. Abandoning the effort to cloak a stealthy sea passage, our
newly constituted Department of Marine Camouflage decked us out in a bold pattern, skillfully
arranged to disrupt our perspective, and give a false impression of our line of
course. With a torpedo traveling to the limit of its run striking anything
that may lie in its course, range is of little account. Deflection, on the
other hand, is everything in the torpedo-man's problem—the correct estimation
of a point of contact of two rapidly moving bodies. He relies for a solution on
an accurate judgment of his target's course; it became the business of the
dazzle-painters to complicate his working by a feint in color and design. The
new camouflage has so distorted our sheer and disrupted the color in the mass
as to make our vessels less easy to hit. If not invisible against average
backgrounds, the dazzlers have done their work so well that we are at least
partially lost in every elongation.
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| Muirhead Bone, from Merchantmen-at-Arms (1919) |
The mystery withheld
from us—the system of our decoration—has done much to ease the rigors of our war-time sea-life.
In argument and discussion on its origin and purpose we have found a topic,
almost as unfailing in its interest as the record day's run of the old sailing
ships. We are agreed that it is a brave martial coat we wear, but are divided
in our theories of production. How is it done? By what shrewd system are we
controlled that no two ships are quite alike in their splendor? We know that
instructions come from a department of the Admiralty to the dockyard painters,
in many cases by telegraph. Is there a system of abbreviations, a colorist’s
shorthand, or are there maritime Heralds in Whitehall who blazon our arms for
the guidance of the rude dockside painters? It can be worked out in fine and
sonorous proportions:
For SS CORNCRIX
Party per pale, a pale; first, gules, a fesse dancette, sable; second,
vert, bendy, lozengy, purpure cottised with nodules of the first; third, sable,
three billets bendwise in fesse, or: sur tout de tout, a barber's pole
cockbilled on a sinking gasometer, all proper. For motto: "Doing them in the eye."
One wonders if our old
conservatism, our clinging to the past, shall persist long after the time of
strife has gone; if, in the years when war is a memory and the time comes to
deck our ships in pre-war symmetry and grace of black hulls and white-painted
deck-work and red funnels and all the gallant show of it, some old masters
among us may object to the change.
“Well, have it as you
like," they may say. "I was brought up in the good old-fashioned
cubist system o' ship painting—fine patterns o' reds an' greens an' Ricketts' blue, an' brandy-ball stripes
an' that! None o' your damned new-fangled ideas of one-color sections for me!…Huh!…And black hulls, too!…Black! A
funeral outfit!…No, sir! I may be wrong, but anyway, I'm too old now to chop
and change about!"
