s anti-U-boats contrivances
take a lot of looking after to prevent their interference with, or even
their complete destruction, by enemy surface craft. All the good
harbours are on the east coast of the Adriatic, and that sea is so
narrow that swift Austrian destroyers can raid all the way across it at
many points, and still have time to get back to their bases the same
night. With our own bases--the only practicable ones available--at the
extreme southern end of the Adriatic, our greatest difficulty, perhaps,
has been in guarding against these swift tip-and-run night-raids by the
enemy's speedy surface craft. I don't know whether the fact that we seem
to have about put an end to their operations of this kind is a greater
tribute to our enterprise or the Austrians' lack of it. The brush in
question occurred as a consequence of the latest of the Austrian
attempts to interfere with the measures which, he knows only too well,
will ultimately reduce his U-boats to comparative impotence.

"I was Number Two in the _Flop_, which, with the _Flip_, was patrolling
a certain billet well over toward the Austrian coast of the Adriatic. We
had turned at about eleven o'clock, and were heading back on a westerly
course, when the captain sighted a number of vessels just abaft the
starboard beam. Being almost in the track of the low-hanging moon, they
were sharply silhouetted; but the queer atmospheric conditions played
such pranks with their outlines that, for a time, he was deceived as to
their real character. The warm, coastal airs, blowing to sea for a few
hours after nightfall, have a tendency to produce mirage effects
scarcely less striking than those one sees on the desert along the Suez
Canal. It was the distortion of the mirage that was responsible for the
fact that the captain mistook two Austrian light cruisers for small
Italian transports (such as we frequently encountered on the run between
Brindisi and Valona or Santi Quaranti), and that he reported what
shortly turned out to be enemy destroyers as drifters.

"The captain had just made a shaded lamp signal to the _Flip_, calling
attention to the ships and their supposed character, when the white,
black-curling bow-wave of the two leaders caught his eye and made him
suspect they were warships. The alarm bell clanging for 'Action
Stations' was the first intimation I had that anything was afoot. In the
Adriatic, as everywhere else, everyone in a destroyer turns in 'all
standi