th him, for
right then new troubles of my own set in.

"I was still down on my knees trying to locate what was missing with
this poor guy, when--out of the corner of my eye, for it was near behind
me--I spotted the flash of a ship challenging. _Bow_ challenged
back--from somewhere aft--and then what I piped at once for a Hun
destroyer switched on searchlights and opened fire. She was about two
cables off on our port quarter, heading right for us and blazing away
with one or two guns, probably all that would bear on that course. A
second destroyer, right astern her, didn't seem to be firing. I heard
the bang and saw the flash of two or three shells bursting somewhere
amidships, and then the _Bow's_ port after gun began to reply. The crews
of all the others were knocked out, and so were the searchlights.

"Between the twenty-three from the _Seagull_ and what were left of the
_Bow's_ fo'c'sl' guns' crews, there must have been thirty-five to forty
men bunched together there for'rard of the wreck of the bridge. When the
firing started, the whole kaboodle of us did what you're always under
orders to do when you have nothing to stand up for--laid down. Or,
rather, we just tumbled into a heap like a pile of dead rabbits.

"I went sprawling over the poor devil I was trying to help, and there
were two or three on top of me. Into that squirming hump of human flesh
one of the Hun's projes landed kerplump. It didn't hit me at all, that
one, but I can feel yet the kind of heave the whole bunch gave as it
ploughed through. Then it was like warm water was being thrown on the
pile in buckets, but it wasn't till I had scrambled out and found it
sticky that I twigged it was blood.

"Bad as it was, it might have been a lot worse. There hadn't been enough
resistance to explode the proj, and so it killed only four or five and
wounded, maybe, twice that, where it would have scoured every man jack
of us into the sea and Kingdom Come if it had gone off. The next one
found something in the wreck of the bridge hard enough to crack it off
though, and it was a ragged scrap of its casing that drove in to the
point of my hip and put a kink in my rolling gait that I've never quite
shaken out yet. It wasn't much of a hurt to what it gave some, though,
'specially a lad that caught the main kick of it and got ditched to
starboard, some of him going under the wire rail, and some over.

"The Huns couldn't have known how down and out the _Bow_ really wa