kily, there's nothing
we can lay our hands on to carry away and prove it. In case this
particular Fritz doesn't come to life and sink another ship in the
course of the next few days, there is just a chance that we may be
credited with a 'Possible.' They never err on the optimistic side in
sizing up a little brush of this kind, and perhaps it's just as well.
Anyhow, a game like this is worth playing on its own account, whether
you come in with a scalp at your belt every time or not."

It was just as darkness was slowing down our anti-U-boat operations,
that a signal came through stating that there were believed to be
several survivors still alive among the wreckage of the _Marmora_, and
ordering us to proceed to the scene of her sinking with all dispatch.
The moon was rising as we began to nose among the pathetic litter of
scraps that was all that remained afloat of what, five or six hours
previously, had been a swift and beautiful auxiliary cruiser.

There was enough light for us to be reasonably sure, at the end of an
hour's search, that our mission was in vain; that there remained no
living man to pick up. There was something strangely familiar, though,
in the lines of a cutter which, in spite of a smashed gunwale, was still
afloat, and I was just thinking of how grateful a lee, in the monsoon,
the windward side of the old _Marmora's_ lifeboats had furnished for a
deck-chair or two, when the captain, advancing the handle of the
engine-room telegraph, turned to me with: "We're off to rendezvous with
the _Lymptania_ now; I think we can promise you some real excitement in
the course of the next day or two."

CHAPTER V

THE CONVOY GAME

The fantastic pile of multi-coloured slabs blotting out a broken patch
of sky above the seaward end of the estuary, if it had been on land,
might have been anything from a row of hangars, viewed in slant
perspective, to the scaffolding of a scenic railway, or a "Goblin's
Castle" in Luna Park. But there in the middle of the channel, the
mountainous bulk could only be one thing, the _Lymptania_, the ship
which our division of American destroyers had been ordered to escort on
that part of its westbound voyage in which there was reckoned to be
danger of submarine attack. Distorted by the camouflage, the tumbled
mass of jumbled colours continued to loom in jagged indefinitiveness as
we closed it from astern, and it was only when we had come up well
abreast of it that the parts set