efore I
was transferred north."

"You don't mean the recent attack on the drifter patrol--the one where
two British destroyers stood the brunt of the attack of four Austrian
destroyers and a light cruiser or two?" I asked. "I have always wanted
to hear about that. I've heard Italian naval men say some very
flattering things of the way the British carried on."

"That's the one," he replied. "I was in the _Flop_--the one that got
rather the worst banging up."

"You've just got time for the yarn before your watch is over," I said,
settling myself into the nearest thing to a listening attitude that one
can assume on the bridge of a destroyer bucking a north-east gale. "Fire
away."

I didn't much expect he would "come through," for I had failed in so
many attempts to draw a good yarn by a frontal attack of this kind that
I had little faith in it as compared with more subtle methods. Perhaps
it was because rough methods were suited to the rough night; or it may
have been only because K----'s mind (his non-working mind, I mean; not
that closed compartment of sense and instinct with which he was
directing his ship) had drifted back to the Adriatic, and he was glad of
the chance to talk about it; at any rate, in the hour that had still to
go before eight bells went for midnight, to the accompaniment of the
banging of the seas on the bows and the obbligato of the spray beating
on the glass and canvas of the screens, he told me the story I asked
for.

"I don't need to tell you," he said, after giving the man at the wheel
the course for the next zigzag, "that the Adriatic is full of various
and sundry little traps and contrivances calculated to interfere as much
as possible with the even tenor of the way of the Austrian U-boats
which, basing at Pola and Trieste, sally forth in an endeavour to
penetrate the Straits of Otranto and attack the commerce of the
Mediterranean. You doubtless also know that this work is very largely in
British hands. This is no reflection whatever on our Italian ally. Italy
simply did not have the material and the trained men for the task in
hand, and since Britain had both, it was naturally up to us to step in
and take it over. This was done over two years ago; but, like the
anti-submarine work everywhere, it is only now just beginning to round
into shape to effect its ends. The winter of his discontent for the
U-boat in these waters is closing in fast.

"You will understand, too, that these variou