Y

ou will find, gentlemen, that the motto of this Service is Safety Last." Thus William Snowden Sims, to twenty newly fledged officers fresh from the Special Training Course.

We were the first of a new brew of "citizen sailors"; nothing quite like us had ever been known before. In the guise of yachtsmen and small boat sailors we had probably seen more of wind and wave than most naval officers of our age. The United States Naval Academy had given us ten weeks of intensive training and shipped us overseas to help "win the war best we could. At Queenstown, where we arrived in October, 1917, we had the privilege of reporting to Admiral Sims in person. He received us in his

as

surprise. We were to do our damnedest, and keep a stiff upper lip.

A great commander, that, and a rare leader of men; not one of us but would gladly have followed him to glory, or to the bottom of the sea.

We came out of his cabin with our heads high and our feet scarcely touching the deck. Then we were distributed among the Flotilla, one to a ship, where another sort of greeting was in store. Our new shipmates viewed us with an interest not unmixed with misgiving: it could scarcely be otherwise when a lot of rank amateurs were inducted into an arduous and highly technical phase of modern naval war.

POSITION on the Wilkes was

to the destroyers which made that port their base, and gave us a talk as memorable as it was brief. Officers were badly needed. The Fleet could spare him no more. We would not be coddled; our duties would be trying to the nth degree, but he had faith in us and looked to us to give the Regulars a

learn", and as such I found little opportunity or occasion for self-expression. My stateroom was about eight feet by five and the wardroom, which I shared with the other officers, was about the size of a living room in a small city apartment. There was plenty of room out on deck, but it was

so cluttered with stacks, hatches, torpedo tubes, guns and other obstructions that in the whole 300 feet of ship there was scarcely a place where one could take ten steps without dodging. The best spot was on the bridge. There one had a sense of mastery that extended beyond the ship herself to the whole sweep of ocean, but usually the weather was so bad that one could not see beyond the third gray topped sea.

We carried five officers and a crew of one hundred men. On a full-power run we could do thirty knots. Our time was divided between patrolling and escort duty, and we would be at sea a week or more at a stretch.

WAS while escorting the Leviathan I to Liverpool on what I believe was her first trip with troops that we got the hardest drubbing of the winter. This happened just before Christmas, when the weather off the Irish Coast was particularly vile. We slipped to sea-six long, sneaky-looking hulls painted in imitation of futuristic nightmares and ripped through the great storm seas on our course to the destroyer rendezvous at 20 West. There were a number of these meeting points, mere geographical positions hundreds of miles west of Ireland, each indicated by a single common English word. It was the most secret code we had. On this occasion, we were required to meet the "Levi" at, let us say, Mule, and the distance was sufficient to make us hustle in order to be there on time.

Where other ships go over a sea, a destroyer slices through it, for she is only some thirty feet wide by eleven deep, which for her length of more than 300 feet is little enough. As a consequence she behaves like a knife

blade, riding on edge. A southeast gale was blowing, as usual, which rolled us till our decks stood nearly perpendicular to their normal plane. On the weather roll sometimes a sea would sweep across our ship and bury her under a ferment of yeasty foam which reminded us, perhaps unpleasantly, of last night's stoup of ale at the Queen's Arms bar. It was not uncommon to see the keel of a sister ship abeam as she took an especially savage roll. But always she came back, so that a few seconds later we would be looking down her stacks. Such antics were trying to the nerves and even more so to the stomach. The only thing they did not seem to trouble was the ships themselves.

formation we used going out Twas that of scouting line, ships abreast and separated from one another by a distance depending upon the visibility. In fairly clear weather this might be several miles, and the escort as a whole would span twenty miles or so from flank to flank. This was done in the hope of surprising an unwary Hun, but I never knew it to succeed, though once, curiously enough, when we were steaming in "column ahead", the last ship in the procession stumbled upon and sank one that had come up to breathe. The aggressor in this case was a little Limey-i.e., British sloop-of-war assigned to our division, and she had fallen so far astern of her position that Fritz doubtless believed the entire escort had passed.

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With the coming of darkness early in those latitudes in midwinter all the boats were called in and formed in column behind us. There were no lights and no sounds, save the roar of wind and the swash of seas.

This was the kind of night when it was unpleasant to run foul of a big inward-bound convoy. Sometimes we would find ourselves in the midst of one before we knew it a collection of twenty to thirty tramp steamers spread over several miles of ocean. Why more ships were not run down and sunk is hard to say, unless it was that we destroyer people developed some sort of psychic feelers that served us in place of eyes.

The weary watches of the night wore on while our bridge, partly sheltered by its weather cloths, seemed the only substantial (if somewhat unstable) thing in a chaotic world. Down forward in the officers' quarters an oilskinned quartermaster pounded on a door with the announcement: "Quarter to four, Mr. Jones. Blowin' hard from the southeast an' pourin' rain. Mr. Webb says you better dress warm an' wear sea boots."

And the relief officer would grunt a "Very well, thank you!" which he was

eerie streamers, nebulous and changeful of shape, or rushed upon us in banks of cotton wool. The ocean, with a young sea from southeast running across the old southwest swell, abandoned all sense of rhythm and served us pyramids, domes, Alpine ranges and mesas, all fluid and melting, each form into the next, without rest or an instant's pause. Our ship plunged, rolled and twisted; she lay now on this beam, and the next instant on that, throwing herself about like a fever patient or a soul on the Devil's grid. To us on board it was somewhat trying. One moved about, when motion was necessary, as much by the arms as by the legs, and it was all one's bones were worth to loose hold for even a fraction of a second. This constant and violent motion produces a fatigue of the nerves, until one learns to adjust one's bodily position automatically and busy the mind with thoughts of other things.

T WAS too rough that day to hold a

the snug security of his bunk. But, oh, how good the five o'clock coffee, the first brew of the day, fresh and fragrant from the cook's galley beneath the bridge! It almost repaid one for turning out at four.

HE morning following our departure from Queenstown dawned raw and cold. The wind had backed into southeast, which was a bad sign. Sea and sky were lead gray and a whipping breeze failed to clear the mist which reduced visibility to a radius of perhaps two miles. Everything one touched was wet; even the wind was wet and the heavens were aqueous vapor; in all the universe there seemed no solid thing. Mist swept past in

during the forenoon the division formed scouting line in obedience to our signal. We were entertained by their antics, speeding to take up position, until each ship in turn faded out in the mist all, that is, but the one next to us on either side, which remained barely within sight.

The purpose of this deployment was to reduce as much as possible the risk of the Leviathan slipping past us unseen, a very easy thing to do when ships are approaching one another in thick weather at high speed. With big mercantile convoys, the danger was not so great, since they occupied a considerable area, but a single ship makes a small mark. We had perforce gone without observations since leav

ing our base; moreover, the "Levi" had an Admiral on board, so that a failure to make contact was certain to be our fault (!) Actually we felt quite sure of our position, and it was perhaps no great compliment to the Leviathan's navigator that our C. O. should lay a snare he could not slip through.

Noon passed. Our big searchlight flashed a signal to the division to reduce speed lest we reach the rendezvous too soon. We had the wind now right on our stern, a rising gale out of the east, blowing doggedly in true British style. It was well enough on this course, but running into it would be quite another thing. We knew that the "Levi" was carrying troops and that nothing would please Fritz more than to sink her, the former crack liner of the German merchant navy, on this her maiden voyage under the

American flag. Furthermore, so much secrecy had surrounded her coming that we dared not use our radio to get a check on her position; therefore, as the afternoon wore on and we came nearer and nearer to the rendezvous, an atmosphere of keen tension pervaded the ship.

Meanwhile the early darkness of midwinter descended upon the gale ridden sea, but the air cleared perceptibly and one could see further under the low clouds.

captain contemplated heading the escort eastward in an effort to keep abreast of the Leviathan during the night, with the hope of making contact when day dawned; but it was rather a slim hope without a knowledge of her course from this point on. There were a dozen different routes by which convoys approached the beleaguered British Isles, each carefully drawn in red on a very secret chart and designated through a special code. The Admiralty, which kept wonderfully close tabs on enemy submarines, was able by this means to shunt convoys around the chief danger areas, much as a railroad yardmaster routes a train to its destination through a congested terminal yard. It worked well as a rule.

MINUTES passed and still no Leviathan. The navigator fidgeted a little, wondering if he had made some trifling but fatal slip to throw the escort off its course. The Old Man's jaw set grimly as he turned with an accusing glance at the bridge clock. But suddenly there went up a shout from the Officer of the Deck and the four lookouts, all at once. Looming out of the darkness ahead a great shape came rushing towards us, dwarfing the seas which tossed us about like a skiff. It was the Leviathan, on time to the dot and splitting the meeting point fairly in two. Indeed, had it been a little darker she might have run us down. A magnificent triumph of thick weather navigation.

We sheered off a little to let her pass, and sent the escort a low power radio to join up, since the flanking ships could not have seen her at all.

Once a convoy was met, the destroyers forming the escort assumed