during all of his recital up to this point, suddenly died out, and he
was staring into nothingness straight ahead of him, where the picture
his memory conjured up seemed to hang in projection.

"It was just before we struck," he went on, speaking slowly, and in an
awed voice strangely in contrast to the rather bantering tone he had
affected before; "and the bows of the _Bow_ were only ten or fifteen
yards off, driving down on us in the middle of the double wave of
greeny-grey foam they were throwing on both sides. By the light of a
fire burning in the wreck of her bridge I saw a lot of bodies lying
round on her fo'c'sl', and right then one of them picked itself up and
stood on its feet. It was a whole man from the chest up, and from a bit
below the waist down, but--for all that I could see--nothing between. Of
course, there must have been an unbroken backbone to make a frame that
would stand up at all, but all the shot-away part was in shadow, so I
saw nothing from the chest to the hips. It was just as if the head and
shoulders were floating in the air. I remember 'specially that it held
its cap crushed tight in one of its hands. The face had a kind of a calm
look on it at first. Then it turned down and seemed to look at what was
gone, and I could see the mouth open as if to holler. Then the crash
came, and I didn't see it again till they were stitching it up in canvas
with a fire-bar before dropping it overside the next day. I learned then
that an 8-inch shell had done the trick--rather a big order for one man
to try to stop."

He took a deep breath, blinked once or twice as though to shut out the
gruesome vision, and when he resumed the corners of a sheepish grin were
cutting into and erasing the lines of horror that had come to his face
in describing it.

"There's no use of my claiming that I was thrown over to the _Bow_ by
the shock," he continued, the twinkle flickering up in his eye again,
"like Jock was pitched over to the _Seagull_. That _did_ happen to three
or four ratings from the _Seagull_, though, one signalman and a chap
standing look-out being chucked all the way from the fore bridge. But in
the case of most of the twenty-three of us who found ourselves adorning
the _Bow's_ fo'c'sl' when the ships broke away, it was the result of a
'flap' started by some ijits yelling that we were cut in two and going
down. What was more natural, then, with the _Bow_ looming up there big
and solid--she was a good sight