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the Navy Department proceeded to put various plans into execution. At
9.30 o'clock one warm April night commanders of various destroyers in
service along the coast received orders to proceed at daylight to the
home navy-yards and fit out with all despatch for distant service. None
of the officers knew what was ahead, not definitely, that is; but all
knew that the future held action of vital sort and with all steam the
venomous gray destroyers were soon darting up and down the coast toward
their various navy-yards, at Boston, New York, and elsewhere.

Arriving here, the vessels went at once into dry dock while a force of
men who were in waiting proceeded to clean and paint the hulls, while
stores and provisions to last three months were assembled. In a few days
the flotilla set forth. No commander knew where he was going.
Instructions were to proceed to a point fifty miles east of Cape Cod,
and there to open sealed instructions. One may imagine the thoughts of
the officers and crews of the sea-fighters--which above all other craft
had signally demonstrated the fact that they and they alone were
qualified to bring the fear of God, as the navy saying is, to the
Germans--as they ploughed through the seas to the point where orders
might be opened and the way ahead made clear.

"And when," said a destroyer commander, speaking of that trip, "I got to
the designated point at midnight, I opened my orders and found that we
were to make for Queenstown. You may be sure I breathed a fervent cheer,
for I had been itching for a crack at the sub ever since certain events
off Nantucket the preceding fall."

The flotilla took ten days in making the journey, the time thus consumed
being due to a southeast gale which accompanied the boats for the first
seven days of the journey. There were various incidents, but nothing of
the dramatic save the picking up and escorting of the big British liner
_Adriatic_, and later the meeting 300 miles off the Irish coast of the
brave little British destroyer _Mary Rose_, which had been sent out to
meet the Americans. The _Mary Rose_, by the way, was sunk three months
later by a German raider. The commander of the _Mary Rose_ assured the
Americans that they would be welcome and that their co-operation would
be highly appreciated.

One may fancy so. Things were looking exceedingly black about that time.
In the previous three weeks submarines had sunk 152 British merchant
vessels, and patrol-vessels