enough. Now and then
some Fritz is found desperate enough to commit hari-kari by coming up
close (if the chance offers) and making sure of getting his torpedo
home. He gets what's coming to him, of course, but there is also a fair
chance of his getting the ship he is after; and a fast liner for a
U-boat is a poor exchange--from our standpoint. Naturally, these things
all make the skipper of the _Lymptania_ anxious to minimise his risks by
hitting up just as hot a pace as he can, and that, with her size and her
power, will be just about full speed. I can't tell you to a knot how
fast that is, but I can tell you this: if you were on the bridge of a
destroyer going at that speed when it hit a good heavy head-sea, the
only thing that would tell you it wasn't a brick wall she had collided
with would be the sort of moist feeling about the pile-driver that
knocked you over the side. So it looks like the rub is going to come in
getting the _Lymptania_ to content herself with a speed at which--well,
at which you can detect some slight difference between a head-sea and a
brick wall from the bridge of the destroyer doing the butting. Whatever
that proves to be, you'll have such a chance as you may never get again
to see what stuff your Uncle Sam's destroyers are made of."

We made screening formation as soon as we were well clear of the
barraged waters of the estuary, though the sea we had to traverse before
entering the open Atlantic was considered practically empty of menace.
The _Lymptania_, making astonishingly little smoke for a coal-burner,
worked up to somewhere near her top speed in a very short time; but,
with the light-running seas well abaft the beam, the destroyers cut
their zigzags round and about her with many knots in reserve. The big
liner, with much experience to her credit, knew precisely what to do and
how to do it, and the whole machine of the convoy worked as though
pulled by a single string. Her very movements themselves seemed to give
the various units of the escort their cues, for, though she steered a
course so devious and irregular that no submarine could have possibly
told how to head in order to waylay her, she was never "uncovered."
Ahead and abreast of her, going their own way individually, but still
conforming their general movements to hers, the destroyers wove their
practically impenetrable screen.

Whatever there was ahead, it was ideal destroyer weather for the moment,
and all hands came swarmi