they were not built for comfort and the general opinion was that they would be in the way if we ever struck the water.

On the afternoon of that first day we were picked up by our escort, eight British destroyers. All hands were watching for them, and finally they appeared on the horizon, tiny dots which grew and took shape as they came tearing up out of the sky line with their dazzling signal lights winking out a message to our fleet. They took up their positions without any fuss whatever and took a load from our minds at the same time. Beside our ship they looked like toys, but very sinister toys, and whatever they did was done with an air of confidence and efficiency that was most reassuring.

So we gradually drew near the end of our trip. We suffered in silence the food which the crew seemed more disposed to sell us between meals than to serve on the table. We absorbed all sorts of rumors: that we were to pick up survivors of a torpedoed ship, that the 4.7 gun at the stern really fired at a submarine and not a floating barrel this noon, that two of our escort got a U-boat the evening before. At last, after having passed within 70 miles of Iceland, we came around by the north of Ireland and saw land on the morning of September 22. Every­ body remembers how good it looked; sheer cliffs of Ireland rising out of the water with white farmhouses and deep green fields marked off by white walls like squares of a checkerboard visible as we passed close; in the distance, a black smudge on the sky that they said was Belfast, and once more the open water ahead

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