beam and I was blind as a bat for a
minute. The _Killarney_ had been left astern when I looked for her
again, and seemed all in, with fires all over her and only one gun
yapping away on her quarter-deck. I didn't know it at the time, but it
was my old college friend, Gains, here, who was passing the projes, for
that pert little piece. You'd never think it to look at him, would you?"
Gains, feigning to discover something which needed adjustment in the
training mechanism, ducked his head behind the breech of his gun at this
juncture, and did not bob up again until a resumption of the yarn
deflected the centre of interest back to Number Two.

[Illustration: GERMAN SHELLS STRIKING THE WATER AT THE BATTLE OF
JUTLAND]

[Illustration: A BROADSIDE AT NIGHT AT THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND]

"Turning to port took us over into the line of the other Division, and
the first thing I knew the _Seagull_ had poked in and taken station
astern of the _Bow_, which was leading it. Just then some Hun
ship, I think it was the same one that strafed the _Killarney_, opened
on the _Bow_ from starboard, the bursting shell splashing all over her
from the funnels right for'ard. _Bow_ turned sharp to port to try to
shake off the searchlights, and _Seagull_ altered at same time to keep
from turning in her wake and running into the shells she was
side-stepping. All of a sudden I saw another destroyer steering right
across our bows, and to keep from ramming her the captain altered back
to starboard. That cleared her stern by an eyelash, but the next second
I saw that it was now only a question of whether _Seagull_ would ram
_Bow_, or _Bow_ would ram _Seagull_. How a dished and done-for
quartermaster, falling across his wheel as he died, decided it in favour
of _Bow_ I did not learn till later.

"The Hun shells were tearing up the water astern of the _Bow_ for half a
minute as she began to close us; then they stopped, and the smash came
at the end of five or ten seconds of dead quiet. It was pitchy dark,
with the flicker of fires on the deck of the _Bow_ making trembly red
splotches in the smoke and steam. A sight I saw by the light of one of
those fires just before the wallop is my main memory of all the hell I
saw in the next quarter hour. It has lasted just as if it was burned
into my brain with a hot iron, and it figures in one way or other in
every nightmare I've had since."

The humorous twinkle in the corner of the man's eye, which had persisted