Full Speed Ahead: Tales From The Log Of A Correspondent

This is war correspondence from an age when reporters embedded with navies still wrote in saddle-stitched prose about courage and courtesy. Henry Beston spent 1918 as the only American correspondent aboard the British Grand Fleet and aboard an American destroyer that saw combat and sank. What emerges is neither jingoism nor cynicism but something rarer: a writer watching young men face death at sea and finding them equal to the moment. Beston chronicles the daily rhythms of naval life, the particular heroism of enlisted men who "keep the highways of the sea," and the strange fellowship between correspondent and crew. His 1919 account reads like a letter from a world where war still had a certain decorum, where a destroyer engagement could be described as "interesting incidents" while men drowned. This is a relic of literary journalism, a time when a correspondent could respect his subjects enough to simply let them be seen.