and the man at the wheel, and the lookouts with their eyes skinned for
U-boats, and the signal quartermasters balanced on the flying bridge and
sending their messages in a jumping sea-way. He would go down to the
chart house with the navigator and stand by to pass him dividers and
parallels. He would stop to sigh when he thought that if somebody had
only tipped him off in time he might have gone to Annapolis and right
now be a young naval officer dashing around on one of these same
destroyers. Still, being a surgeon on one of them wasn't too bad. If
they had a battle or anything, a ship's doctor wasn't going to be too
far away.

It was in his third cruise that the 352 got the S O S which resulted in
the rescue of the big steamer spoken of. There had been other S O S's--any
number of them--but this time there was something doing for our young
doctor. When she signalled that nine of her people had been wounded by
shell and shrapnel fire, and the 352's skipper ordered a deck officer and
a whale-boat away, he also told Doc to break out his medical gear and go
along. Doc already had his surgical gear ready; from the first word of
the shelling he had gone below, and now everything was laid out ready for
action on the ward-room transom.

Over to the ship they went, all hands in life-vests, and while the deck
officer of the 352 was cross-questioning the captain and engineer, and
looking around to see how much damage had been done and so on, Doc was
rigging up an operating-table between the chart house and the chart deck
rail, slinging the table in sort of hammock style so that when the ship
rolled she would not roll his patients overboard.

Doc was no mean little operator. The great danger to most of the wounded
men was of infection. One after the other, he had his cases up, asked
about four questions, had about four looks, and went to it. No knowing
that the U-boat might pop up again and try a few more shells, or that a
bulkhead would not give way, or a boiler blow up when they tried to make
steam below. No knowing; no.

Up they came to his swinging table, where Doc took a probe, poked into
the wound, wrapped cotton around the probe, soaked it in iodine, jabbed
it in, twisted it around, swabbed it out, dressed it down, slapped the
patient on the chest, said "Next," and did it all over again.

"Next! You'd think it was a blessed barber's shop," Doc heard one of
them say. Only he was an officer--by the back of his head Doc