CHAPTER V

THE CONVOY GAME

The fantastic pile of multi-coloured slabs blotting out a broken patch of sky above the seaward end of the estuary, if it had been on land, might have been anything from a row of hangars, viewed in slant perspective, to the scaffolding of a scenic railway, or a "Goblin's Castle" in Luna Park. But there in the middle of the channel, the mountainous bulk could only be one thing, the _Lymptania_, the ship which our division of American destroyers had been ordered to escort on that part of its westbound voyage in which there was reckoned to be danger of submarine attack. Distorted by the camouflage, the tumbled mass of jumbled colours continued to loom in jagged indefinitiveness as we closed it from astern, and it was only when we had come up well abreast of it that the parts settled down into "ship-shapeliness," and the silhouette of perhaps the most famous of the world's great steamers sharpened against the sunlit afternoon clouds.

The change which had been wrought in the appearance of the _Lymptania_ since last I had seen her was almost beyond belief. Then she had been a hospital ship, with everything about her, from snowy whiteness to red crosses in paint and coloured lights, calculated to establish her character, to give her the protection of conspicuousness. Now she sought protection in quite the opposite way. Every trick of scientific camouflage had been employed to render her inconspicuous; while, if that failed, there were the destroyers. The protection of these big liners is a considerable undertaking, but it has its redeeming features. As U-boat bait they are unrivalled, and the number of German submarines which have been sent to the bottom as a direct consequence of attempting to sink one of them will make a long and interesting list when the time comes to publish it.

There was something almost awesome in the emptiness of the great ship, in the lifelessness of the decks, in the miles of blinded ports. The heads of a few sailors "snugging down" on the forecastle, a knot of officers at the end of the bridge, and two stewardesses in white uniforms leaning over the rail of one of the upper decks--that was all there was visible of human life on a ship which a few days before had been packed to the funnels with its thousands of American soldiers. A lanky destroyer gunner lounging by a ladder, described her exactly when he said to one of his mates: "Gee, but ain't she the lonesome one!"

The captain of the _Zip_ turned his glasses back to cover the little group of officers on the liner's bridge. "There's the skipper," he said presently. "I only hope he's well ahead of the game on the sleeps, for I wouldn't mind betting that he won't be leaving that bridge for a cup of coffee for some time. It's going to be an anxious interval for him--very anxious. It's quite beyond calculation, the value to the Allies at this moment of a ship of the size and speed of the _Lymptania_, and her skipper must know from what has happened the last week, that the Huns are all out to bag her this time, and he can hardly be able to extract any too much comfort out of the fact that it's about a hundred to one that we'll bag the Fritz that tries it--either before or after the event. Yes, it will be an anxious time for him--but," a grimly wry smile coming to his face as he turned his eyes to the opening seaward horizon, "even so, it'll be nothing to the time we're in for in the _Zip_ and all the rest of the escort. _He'll_ be able to sleep if he happens to take a notion to; _we_ won't, at least, not during the time we've got _her_ to shepherd. Again, he's only got the _chance_ of being hit by a torpedo to worry about; we've got the _certainty_ of being hit by head-seas that have as much kick in them to a driven destroyer as a tin-fish full of gun-cotton. Unless the weather gets either a good deal better or a shade worse, we're sure up against the real thing this time.

"The fact is," continued the captain, taking up the slack in the hood of his weather-proof jacket as a slight alteration of course brought a new slant of wind; "the fact is, I'd much rather see it get worse than better. If it would only kick up enough sea so that there was no chance of a submarine operating in it, she could drive right along on her own without any need of destroyers. But so long as we've this weather there's a possibility of a torpedo running in, we've got to hang on to the last shiver, and there are two or three things which are going to make 'hanging on' this particular trip just a few degrees worse than anything we've stacked up against before. This is about the way things stand: The _Lymptania's_ best protection is her speed; but while she is just about the fastest of the big ships, she is also just about the biggest of the fast ships. This means that the size of the target she presents goes a long way toward offsetting the advantage of her speed; so that the presence of destroyers--in any kind of weather a submarine can work in--is very desirable, and may be vital.

"Now the escorting of any steamer that makes over twenty knots an hour is a lively piece of business, no matter what the weather, for destroyers, to screen most effectively, should zigzag a good deal more sharply than their convoy, and that, of course, calls for several knots more speed. This can be managed all right in fair weather, or even in rough, where there is only a following or a beam sea; but where the seas come banging down from more than a point or two for'ard of the beam it is quite a different matter. In that event, the speed of the whole procession depends entirely on how much the destroyers can stand without being reduced to scrap-iron. Naturally, the ship under escort endeavours to make her speed conform to the best the destroyers can do under the circumstances; but since an extra knot or two an hour might well make all the difference in avoiding a submarine attack, the tendency always is to keep the escorting craft extended to just about their limit of endurance.

"Just how the mean will be struck between what a fast steamer thinks its escorting destroyers _ought_ to stand, and what the destroyers really _can_ stand, depends upon several things. Perhaps the principal factor is the state of mind of the skipper of the steamer, and that, in turn, is influenced by the value of his ship--both actual and potential--and the danger of submarine attack at that particular time in the waters under traverse. When the destroyers set out to escort a very fast and valuable ship, steering into heavy head seas in waters where there are known to be a number of U-boats operating, they've got the whole combination working against them, and the result is--just what you're slated to see this trip. Best take a good look at the _Zip_ while you've got a chance; she may be quite a bit altered by the time we get back to port again. And you might take a squint at the _Flossie_ over there, too. She's our latest and swiftest, the Fotilla's pride. But this is her first experience of taking out an ex-ocean greyhound, and if, in a burst of fresh enthusiasm, she chances to tap any of these several extra knots of speed she is supposed to have--well, the _Flossie's_ sky-line in that case will be modified more than those of all the rest of her older and wiser sisters put together."

Those were prophetic words.

"The one thing that makes it certain that we'll be put to the limit to-night," resumed the captain, after he had rung up more speed on our coming out into opener water, "is the news in this morning's official announcement of the sinking of the _Justicia_. We seem just to have struck the peak of the midsummer U-boat campaign. It was scarcely a week ago that they got the _Carpathian_. Then, a few days later, came the _Marmora_ (you won't forget for a while the strafe we had at the U-boat which put her down), and now it's the _Justicia_, the biggest ship they've sunk in a year or so. That's the thing that must be worrying the skipper of the _Lymptania_, for it shows they're after the great troop-carriers. The way they stuck to the _Justicia_ proves they're not yet beyond taking some risk if the stake is high enough. Now and then some Fritz is found desperate enough to commit hari-kari by coming up close (if the chance offers) and making sure of getting his torpedo home. He gets what's coming to him, of course, but there is also a fair chance of his getting the ship he is after; and a fast liner for a U-boat is a poor exchange--from our standpoint. Naturally, these things all make the skipper of the _Lymptania_ anxious to minimise his risks by hitting up just as hot a pace as he can, and that, with her size and her power, will be just about full speed. I can't tell you to a knot how fast that is, but I can tell you this: if you were on the bridge of a destroyer going at that speed when it hit a good heavy head-sea, the only thing that would tell you it wasn't a brick wall she had collided with would be the sort of moist feeling about the pile-driver that knocked you over the side. So it looks like the rub is going to come in getting the _Lymptania_ to content herself with a speed at which--well, at which you can detect some slight difference between a head-sea and a brick wall from the bridge of the destroyer doing the butting. Whatever that proves to be, you'll have such a chance as you may never get again to see what stuff your Uncle Sam's destroyers are made of."

We made screening formation as soon as we were well clear of the barraged waters of the estuary, though the sea we had to traverse before entering the open Atlantic was considered practically empty of menace. The _Lymptania_, making astonishingly little smoke for a coal-burner, worked up to somewhere near her top speed in a very short time; but, with the light-running seas well abaft the beam, the destroyers cut their zigzags round and about her with many knots in reserve. The big liner, with much experience to her credit, knew precisely what to do and how to do it, and the whole machine of the convoy worked as though pulled by a single string. Her very movements themselves seemed to give the various units of the escort their cues, for, though she steered a course so devious and irregular that no submarine could have possibly told how to head in order to waylay her, she was never "uncovered." Ahead and abreast of her, going their own way individually, but still conforming their general movements to hers, the destroyers wove their practically impenetrable screen.

Whatever there was ahead, it was ideal destroyer weather for the moment, and all hands came swarming out on the dry sun-warmed deck to make the most of it while it lasted. An importunate whine from a nest of arms and legs sprawling abreast the midships torpedo-tubes attracted my attention for a moment as I sauntered aft to see what was afoot, and presently the rattle of dice on the deck and an imploring "Come on, you Seven!" told me they were "shooting Craps," with, I shortly discovered, bars of milk chocolate and sticks of chewing-gum for stakes. Several others were playing "High, Low, Jack," and here and there--using elbows and knees to keep the bellying pages from blowing away--were little knots clustered about the latest Sunday Supplement from New York.

But quite the best thing of all was two brown-armed youngsters going through a proper battery warming-up with a real baseball. I had seen enthusiasts on two or three of the American units with the Grand Fleet playing catch right up to the moment "General Quarters" was sounded for target practice; but that was on the broad decks of battleships, with some chance of saving a ball that chanced to be muffed. But here the pitcher had to wind-up with a sort of a corkscrew stoop to keep from hitting his hand against a stay, while the catcher braced himself with one foot against a depth-charge and the other against the mounting of the after-gun. There were four or five things that the ball had to clear by less than a foot in its flight from one to the other, but the only ones of these I recall now are a searchlight diaphragm and a gong which sounded from the bridge a standby signal to the men at the depth-charges. I actually saw that skilfully directed spheroid make two complete round-trips, from the pitcher to the catcher and back, before it struck the gong a resonant bing! caromed against the side of an out-slung boat and disappeared into the froth of the wake.

The pitcher and catcher were in a hot argument as to whether that was the twenty-sixth or the twenty-seventh ball they had lost overboard since the first of the month, but they fell quiet and turned sympathetic ears to my description of a net I had seen rigged on one of the American battleships to prevent that very trouble.

"Nifty enough," was the pitcher's comment when I had finished describing how the net was drawn taut right under the stern to prevent all leakage. "Only thing is, the captain might rule it off on the score that it'd catch the 'cans' we was trying to drop on Fritz as well as the 'wild pitches.' Might do for harbour use, though. Lost balls is a considerable drain even there."

It was just before dinner-time that the lengthening life of the seas gave warning that we were coming out into the Atlantic. The force of them was still abaft the beam, however, and their principal effect was to add a few degrees of roll, with an occasional deluge dashing in admonitory flood across the decks. But it was enough to make the Ward Room untenable, so that dinner had to be wolfed propped up on the transoms, one nicely balanced dish at a time. There would be about an hour more of this comparative comfort, the captain said, before we reached a position where the full force of the seas would be felt, but things would not really "begin to drop" till the _Lymptania_ altered course and headed westerly. "If you have any writing, reading, sleeping, or anything except just existing to do," he warned, as he kept his soup from overflowing by an undulant gesture of the hand which poised it, "better do it now. It's your last chance."

The forty winks I managed to snatch as a result of following up the sleeping part of that recommendation stood me in good stead in the times ahead. It took no little composing to doze off even as it was, and it was the sharp bang my head got from the siderail of my bunk that put a period to the nap I did get. The rolling had increased enormously, and though it was apparent we were not yet bucking into it, the swishing of the water on the forecastle overhead indicated that there had been enough alteration of course to bring the seas--on one leg of the zigzags at least--well forward of the beam. I climbed out, pulled on my weather-proof suit and sea-boots, and clambered up to the bridge.

There were still a couple of hours to go before dark, and in the diffused light of a bright bank of sunset clouds the gay dazzle colours of all the ships showed up brilliantly as they ploughed the whitecap-plumed surface of a sea which now stretched unbrokenly to the westward horizon. There was a world of power behind the belligerent bulk of swells which had been gathering force under the urge of a west-nor'-west wind that had chased them all the way from Labrador, and the destroyers, teetering quarteringly along their foam-crested tops, were rolling drunkenly and yawing viciously ahead of jagged wakes.

Still driving on at express speed, however, they continued to maintain perfect formation on the swiftly steaming _Lymptania_. The latter, apparently as steady as though "chocked up" in a dry-dock, drove serenely on in great swinging zigzags.

The captain came up from the chart-room and took a long look around. "It's just about as I expected," he said, shaking his head dubiously. "It isn't so rough but what a submarine might stage an attack if her skipper had the nerve; and it's a darn sight too rough for destroyers to screen the _Lymptania_ with her holding to anything like full speed. It's all up now to _what_ speed she will try to hold us to."

"But what's the matter with this?" I protested. "We're still hitting the high places for speed, and, while I wouldn't call this exactly comfortable, we still seem to be making pretty good weather of it."

The captain smiled indulgently. "You're right," he said, "as far as you go. We are indeed hitting the high places, but--the high places haven't started hitting us yet. Wait just about five or ten minutes," he added, turning his glasses to where the great liner, silhouetted for the moment against the sunset clouds, ploughed along on our port beam, "and you'll see the difference. Ah!" this as he steadied his glasses on where the boiling wake of the _Lymptania_, beginning to bend away in a sharp curve indicating a considerable alteration of course. "There she goes now. Hold tight!"

With his hand on the engine-room telegraph, the captain gave the men at the wheel a course to conform to that of the _Lymptania_. Quick as a cat on her helm, the _Zip_ swung swiftly through eight points and plunged ahead. This brought on her bows seas that had been rolling up abeam, and we were up against the real thing at last.

The first sea, which she caught while she was still turning, the _Zip_ contented herself with slicing off the truculently-tossing top of before crunching it underfoot. It was a smartly-executed performance, and seemed to promise encouragingly as to the way she might be expected to dispose of the next ones. The second in line, however, which she met head-on and essayed the same tactics with, dampened her ardour--and just about everything and everybody else below the foretop--by detaching a few tons of its bumptious bulk and raking her fore-and-aft with its rumbling green-white flood. The bridge was above the main weight of that blow, but 'midships and aft I saw men bracing themselves against a knee-deep stream. One bareheaded and bare-armed man, who had evidently been surprised in making his way from one hatch to another, I saw rolled fifteen or twenty feet and slammed up against the torpedo-tube which prevented his going overboard. He limped out of sight, rubbing his shoulder, and probably never knew how lucky he was in being caught by _that_ wave instead of one which came along a minute later.

The slams which she received from the next two or three seas left the _Zip_ in a somewhat chastened mood, and rather less sanguine respecting her ability to go on pulling off that little stunt of surmounting waves by biting them in the neck and then trampling their bodies under foot. She was beginning to realise that she had a body of her own, and that there was something else around that could bite--yes, and kick, and gouge, and punch below the belt, and do all the other low-down tricks of the underhand fighter.

Languid and uncertain of movement, like a dazed prize-fighter, she was just steadying herself from the jolt a bustling brute of a comber had dealt her in passing, when the skyline ahead was blotted out by the imminent green-black loom of a running wall of water which, from its height and steepness, might well have been kicked up by a Valparaiso "Norther" or a South Sea hurricane.

It may have been the chastened state of mind the last sea had left her in which was responsible for _Zip's_ deciding to take this one "lying down"; or again, it may be that she was acting, in reverse, after the example set by the rabbit who, because he couldn't go under the hill, went over it. At any rate, after one shuddering look at the mountainous menace tottering above her bows, she made up her mind that she was better off under the sea than on the surface, and deliberately dived. Of course, it was the Parthian kick the last sea had given her stern that was really responsible for her bows starting to go down at the very instant those of every other ship that one had had experience of would have been beginning to point skyward, but to all intents and purposes she looked, from the bridge, to be submerging of her own free and considered decision. The principal thing which differentiated it from the ordinary dive of a submarine was the fact that it was made at a sharper angle and at about four times the speed.

There was something almost uncanny in the quietness with which that plunge began; though, on the latter score, there was nothing to complain of by about half a second later. I have seen at one time or another almost every conceivable kind of craft, from a Fijian war canoe to the latest battlecruiser, trying to buck head seas, and invariably the wave that swept it had the decency to announce its coming by a warning knock on the bows. This time there was nothing of the kind. The retreating sea had lifted her stern so high that the forecastle was under water even before the coming one had begun to topple over on to it. The consequence was that there was no preliminary bang to herald the onrush of the latter.

The base of the mountainous roller simply flooded up over the diving forecastle and crashed with unbroken force against the bridge. We had collided with the "brick wall" right enough, and for the next few seconds at least the result was primal chaos.

I have a vivid but detached recollection of two or three things in the instant that the blow impended. One is of the helmsman, crouching low, with legs wide apart, locking his arms through the slender steel spokes of the wheel the better to steady her in the coming smash. Another is of the captain, with hunched shoulders and set jaw, throwing over the telegraph to stop the engines. But the clearest picture of all is of the submarine lookout on the port side--a black-eyed, black-haired boy with a profile that might have been copied from an old Roman coin--who was leaning out and grinning sardonically into the very teeth of the descending hydraulic ram. It was his savagely-flung anatomy, I believe, though I never made sure, which bumped me in the region of the solar plexus a moment later and broke my slipping hold on the buckling stanchion to which I was trying to cling.

There was nothing whatever suggestive of water--soft, fluent, trickling water--in the first shattering impact of that mighty blow. It was as solid as a collision between ship and ship; indeed, the recollection I have of a railway wreck I was once in on a line in the Argentine Pampas is of a shock less shattering. It is difficult to record events in their proper sequence, partly because they were all happening at once, and partly because the self-centred frame of mind I was in at the moment was not favourable for detached observation. The noise and the jar of the crash were stupendous, yet neither of these has left so vivid a mental impression as the uncanny writhing of the two-inches-thick steel stanchion to which I was endeavouring to hold, and the nerve-racking sound of rending metal. I have no recollection of hearing the clink of broken glass, nor of being struck by pieces of it; yet all the panes of heavy plate which screened the forward end of the bridge--of a thickness, one had supposed, to withstand anything likely to assail them--were swept away as though they had been no more than the rice-paper squares of a Japanese window.

The rush of water, of course, followed instantly upon the crash, yet, so vivid are my impressions of the things intimately connected with the blow itself that it seems as though there was an appreciable interval between the fall of that and the time when the enveloping cataclysm transformed the universe into a green-white stream of brine. From ahead, above and from both sides the flood poured, to meet and mingle in a whirling maelstrom in the middle of the bridge. There was nothing of blown spindrift to it; it was green and solid and flowed with a heave and a hurl that made no more of slamming a man to the deck than of tossing a life-buoy. I went the whole length of the bridge when I lost my grip on the port stanchion, brought up against the after-rail, and then went down into a tangle of signal flags. I remember distinctly, though, that the walls of water rushing by completely blotted out sea and sky to port and starboard, and that there was all the darkness of late twilight in the cavern of the engulfed bridge. Then the great sea tumbled aft along the main deck, and it grew light again.

The captain and the helmsman had both kept their feet, and the latter, dripping from head to heel, was just throwing over the engine-room telegraph as I shook off my mantle of coloured bunting and crawled back to my moorings at the stanchion. Immediately afterwards I saw him jump on to the after-rail and make some sort of negative signal to a couple of half-drowned boys who, waist-deep in swirling water, were pawing desperately among the depth-charges. Then he came over and joined me for a few moments.

"Some sea, that," he said, slipping down his hood and throwing back the brine-dripping hair from his forehead. "It's happened before, but never like that. Lord only knows what it's done to her. S'pose we'll begin to hear of that in a minute." He pointed to a string of porcelain insulators dangling at the end of twisted bits of wire in front of one of the paneless windows. "That's the remains of our auxiliary radio," he said, grinning; "and look at the fo'c'sle. Swept clean, pretty near. Thank heaven, the gun's left. But, do you remember that heavy iron bar the muzzle rested on? Gone! It was probably that, with some of the shells in the rack, that made all that rat-a-tat. But what of it? Look how she rides 'em now that she's eased down a bit. Only trouble is, she's got to go it again. Look how we've dropped back." And he gave the engine-room, by voice-pipe, a new "standard" speed, and threw the telegraph over to "Full."

The pulsing throb began anew, and under the urge of speeding propellers the _Zip_, steering in narrowed zig-zags quickly regained her station. All of the destroyers, and the _Lymptania_ as well, had eased down slightly, and the reduced speed meant also a reduction of the danger of another of those deep-sea dives, something no craft but a submarine is built to stand the strain of. But even as it was we were driving right up to the limit of endurance all the time, and the sea that did not come rolling up green right over the bows was the exception rather than the rule. From the forecastle right away aft there was never more than a few seconds at a time when the main deck was free of rollicking cascades of boiling brine, and there were moments when only the funnels and the after superstructure, rearing up like isolated rocks on a storm-beaten coast, were visible above the swirling flood. There were times when the men standing-by at the guns and torpedo-tubes seemed almost to be engulfed; yet none of them was swept away, and they even--from the way they kept joking each other in the lulls--appeared to be getting a good deal of sport out of the thing.

The barometer was falling, and both wind and waves gained steadily in force as the afternoon lengthened and merged into a twilight that was itself already melting before the rising moon. Clouds were few and scattering, and it was plain there were to be no hours dark enough to offer any protection from submarine attack. Looming as large as ever, the big liner offered scarcely a better target on the side she was illuminated by the moonlight than on the one from which she was silhouetted against it. From either side a fifth of a mile of steel would "take a lot of missing," and her captain, sensibly enough, would not ease his engines by a revolution more than was necessary to keep within his destroyer screen. It was plainly up to the destroyers to stick it to the limit, and that is just what they did. As I heard one of the men put it, it was the "bruisiest" bit of escort-work they had ever been--or probably ever will be--called upon to face, but every one of those Yankee destroyers stayed with it to the finish.

Now it would be the _Zop_ that would emerge from under a mountainous sea and come drifting back without steerage weigh, rolling drunkenly in the trough, and now it would be the _Zap_. And now this or that result of a "hydraulic ramming" would disable one of the others temporarily. But, game to the last flake of brine-frosted camouflage, back they came to it again, and again, and yet again. Sunrise of the next day found them plugging on in station, and in station they remained until the _Lymptania_, beyond the zone of all possible submarine danger, made a general signal of "Thank you," and headed off to the westward on her own.

* * * * *

Out of the dim grey dawn of the morning after the night before, battered and buckled, but still unbroken, the wearily waggling line of the _Lymptania's_ late escort trailed back into harbour. The mussed-up silhouette of every one of them bore mute testimony to the way she had been put "through the mill," and, in most cases, the things that met the eye were not the worst. The _Zop_ needed every yard of the channel as she zig-zagged up it under a jury steering-gear, and the _Zap_, like a man dazed from a blow, would have sudden "mental hiati" in which she would straggle carelessly out of line with an inconsequential going-to-pick-flowers-by-the-roadside sort of air. The _Zim's_ idiosyncrasies had more of an epileptic suddenness about them, and her hectic coughing plainly indicated some kind of "lung trouble." Our little _Zip_ presented a very brave front to the outer world, but I heard hollow clankings punctuating the erstwhile even hum of the engines, while the drip, drip, drip and the drop, drop, drop through the crinkled sheet-steel sheathing of my cabin told that the deck-plates of the forecastle fitted a good deal less snugly than before they had played anvil to the lusty head-sea hammer.

But the _Flossie_, the "latest, the swiftest, the flotilla's pride"--the wounds of all the rest of us put together were as nothing to those of the _Flossie_. In trying to maintain her pride of place at the head of the escort, she _had_, for a brief space, unleashed those extra knots of speed the captain had spoken of, and all that, and even more than, he had prophesied had come to pass. It was just such a swaggerer of a sea as that first one that _Zip_ had dived into which did the trick, only, as the _Flossie_ was going faster, the impact was somewhat more severe. She was a mile or more distant from us when it happened, and, watching from the bridge of the _Zip_, we simply saw her dissolve into a sky-tossed spout of foam. When she reappeared she was floating, beam-on, to the seas, and, for the moment, an apparently helpless hulk.

The captain's instant diagnosis of a couple of muffled detonations which followed was entirely correct.

"That sea must have 'jack-knifed' the _Flossie_ so sharply," he said, "that the recoil took up the slack in the wires, releasing two 'cans' she seems to have had set and ready. It's about the same thing as just happened to us, except that the tautened wire only rang the stand-by bell, the signal for the men to set the depth-charges. First thing I did after we came to the surface was to negative that supposed order. That was what I was doing when I waved to those boys who were clawing at the 'cans,' with their heads under water. Lucky they weren't carried away."

It was a chastened _Flossie_ which had gone floundering back to station a few minutes later, but somehow or other she had managed to carry on, and now she was back at Base. I won't "give comfort to the enemy" by trying to describe her appearance, but some hint of it may be gleaned from the laconic comment of one of the _Zip's_ signalmen, as the "Flotilla's Pride" was warping in to moor alongside the mother ship.

"Gee whiz!" he ejaculated. "See the old _Vindictive_ limpin' home from Zeebruggy! S'pose they'll fill her up with concrete now an' block a channel."

The captain grinned as he overheard the remark where he waited by the starboard rail for the last of the mooring lines to be made fast. "It's not quite so bad as that," he said. "If need be, they'll have her, and all the rest of us, right as trivets in three or four days, and quite ready to take the sea again when our turn comes. It's all in the convoy game, anyhow, and not such bad fun after all, 'specially when it's behind you, and you've got a bath, and a change, and a lunch at the Club, and an afternoon of tennis in immediate prospect. Come along."