Gilbert Maltravers, of His Majesty’s Ship Hindustan, has just been promoted to full lieutenant and has decided to jump ship. The Hindustan, anyway, not the Navy, though he has his doubts about his future there unless there’s a war. Gilbert has his eye on the growing submarine fleet, which appears to him to be where the action will be in the next war, not on Victorian relics. Speaking of, there are a great many Victorian relics in the Admiralty, who (in Wareham’s rendition) are utterly oblivious to the facts of modern navies: they expect the submarine crew to be armed with cutlasses for taking prizes, despite the fact that the submarines barely have room for their crews and basic equipment. Damned Un-English is set in the years leading up to the Great War, and as such contains almost no action beyond practice exercises: the book consists entirely of Gilbert learning about the service, being lectured to or lecturing others, and occasionally having stilted Regency-style conversations with his family and finance Miriam about his wicked brother or the future. Gilbert appears to be possessed by a specter from the future who not only knows that war is coming, but knows in great detail how it will play out — including the collapse of Russia and that it will be not only a general European war, but one with global scope despite a humble beginning in the Balkans. (Quote one character: “Do you think this war, if it eventuates, will be so great?”) Maltravers is generally anachronistic, and the characters he antagonizes are thoroughly caricatures. For the reader who is interested in the surfacing submarine service, there’s a wonderful amount of detail here on technical aspects, command structure, etc. As a story, though, it’s a dead loss, just lots of self-satisfied people talking to one another. I suspect if Wareham continues in the series then combat scenes will counter-balance the talking, as it did in the author’s Falling into Battle.