Then the Welshmen fallen in beside us began to sing.

From Unofficial History by William Slim.  That would be William Joseph Slim, 1st Viscount Slim, KG, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, GBE, DSO, MC, KStJ.  One of his adventures in World War I.  He is leading a Company of conscripts he has trained out from Britain to India.  A different world.  

The Mediterranean brought us internal peace, but a keener realization of the danger without. We studded the ship with amateur look-outs, who identified as an enemy submarine everything from a dead mule to a school of porpoises. When Crown and Anchor palled we amused ourselves by sing-songs, and in these we were lucky, for we had on board a draft of a couple of hundred Welsh Territorials bound for India. They sang magnificently as one great choir, and to listen to their Celtic harmonies rising to the calm evening skies while the ship’s mast drew lazy arcs across the stars was to realize how and why music can be part of the fabric of a race.

Just after early dinner one evening I was climbing into a bath—not the time one would normally choose, but in a crowded transport junior officers take their baths as they can get them—when, above the generous rush of sea water from the tap, I heard the familiar clanging of bells. Cursing another practice alarm, I wrapped a towel round my middle and pulled on the Burberry that served me as dressing-gown. As I made for my cabin and a lifebelt the alleyways were full of men swarming up to the decks. Suddenly over all the din sounded a dull thud; the gun at our stern was firing. This was no practice alarm. With the lifebelt under my arm I dashed for my boat station. The watertight doors were closing slowly as I leapt through them.

I found my men already fallen in along the rail on the forward deck. They stood in two lines, very silent in their lifebelts, while the deck beneath their bare feet vibrated to the beat of straining engines, and all round them, packed close, crowded the tense ranks of other drafts. An officer told me he had seen the greenish track of a torpedo cross our bows a few minutes before, and our gun was firing rapidly, but the superstructure of the bridge towering above us prevented us from seeing its target. Then, without warning, over the top of the bridge something rustled through the air, cleared our crowded deck, and fell into the sea far ahead with a white splash—the submarine had surfaced and was firing at us. Again and again a shell passed over us, small shells judging from the sound, and aimed at the bridge, but the effect of one of them plunging into the solid mass jammed tight on the foredeck would not bear thinking about.

I looked at the men. They were steady enough, but faces were white and drawn. No one spoke. The uncanny silence was broken only by the thud, thud of our gun astern, the rush of water past the ship, and that sinister rustle overhead. For minutes we stood with nothing but our imaginations to occupy us, waiting the shell that would find us. All around me I could feel in the crush of men a pent-up emotion struggling for outlet.

Then the Welshmen fallen in beside us began to sing. It was not a case of one or two starting and the others joining in; they began suddenly altogether as one man. They sang ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, and they sang it just as beautifully as they had on calmer evenings when no shells whispered overhead. I turned and watched them, row after row of pale faces, upturned and absorbed. They stopped as abruptly as they had begun. As an example of steadiness and discipline it was strange and moving, yet somehow the hymn with its melancholy cadences made me think of the sinking of the Titanic. I shivered.

Again that horrible rustle, this time so low over our heads that men ducked and the ranks swayed. An uneasy murmur went up from the crowd. Then behind me a solitary voice began suddenly to sing. It was Chuck. Hoarsely and without much regard for tune he roared out the chorus of a pre-war music hall ditty, with the refrain, ‘I don’t care if the ship goes down, it doesn’t belong to me!’ A coarse, silly song, but Chuck put into it such a ring of reckless defiance, of vitality, of humour, that jangled nerves were steadied, imaginations mastered. Some laughed, some joined in. We were ourselves again.

The shelling ceased; we had shaken off our pursuer. For another hour the ship drove through the deepening dusk, while the men sang, and then the bugles blew the ‘Dismiss’. As I walked back to my cabin I was cold, and I tried to believe that was why my knees trembled.