sticking up out of the water. Now my last vestige of pleasure and
confidence was gone. I went almost mad trying to watch all the gulls
at once.

"What will you do if you see a submarine?'

"Run it down," said the captain calmly. "That's the only chance we've
got. That is, if we see the boat itself. These little Channel steamers
make about twenty-six knots, and the submarine, submerged, only about
half of that. Sixteen is the best they can do on the surface. Run them
down and sink them, that's my motto."

"What about a torpedo?"

"We can see them coming. It will be hard to torpedo this boat--she
goes too fast."

Then and there he explained to me the snowy wake of the torpedo, a
white path across the water; the mechanism by which it is kept true to
its course; the detonator that explodes it. From nervousness I shifted
to enthusiasm. I wanted to see the white wake. I wanted to see the
Channel boat dodge it. My sporting blood was up. I was willing to take
a chance. I felt that if there was a difficulty this man would escape
it. I turned and looked back at the khaki-coloured figures on the deck
below.

Taking a chance! They were all taking a chance. And there was one, an
officer, with an empty right sleeve. And suddenly what for an
enthusiastic moment, in that bracing sea air, had seemed a game,
became the thing that it is, not a game, but a deadly and cruel war. I
never grew accustomed to the tragedy of the empty sleeve. And as if to
accentuate this thing toward which I was moving so swiftly, the
British Red Cross ship, from Boulogne to Folkstone, came in sight,
hurrying over with her wounded, a great white boat, garnering daily
her harvest of wounded and taking them "home."

Land now--a grey-white line that is the sand dunes at Ambleteuse,
north of Boulogne. I knew Ambleteuse. It gave a sense of strangeness
to see the old tower at the water's edge loom up out of the sea. The
sight of land was comforting, but vigilance was not relaxed. The
attacks of submarines have been mostly made not far outside the
harbours, and only a few days later that very boat was to make a
sensational escape just outside the harbour of Boulogne.

All at once it was twilight, the swift dusk of the sea. The boat
warped in slowly. I showed my passport, and at last I was on French
soil. North and east, beyond the horizon, lay the thing I had come to
see.

CHAPTER II

"SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE"

Many people have seen Boulogne and ha