ccident that
the course she was steering to join up with a couple of other ships of
her flotilla on some kind of "hunting" stunt took her across that of the
convoy, and passed it in inspiring panoramic review before our eyes.
From dusky blurs of smoke trailing low along the horizon, ship after
ship--from ex-floating palaces with famous names to angular craft of
strange design which were evidently the latest word in standardised
construction--they rose out of the sea (as our quartering course brought
us nearer) until a wide angle of our seaward view was blocked by an
almost solid wall of steadily steaming steel.

There was a lot to stir the imagination in that sight--aye, fairly to
grip you by the throat as a dawning sense of what it portended sank
home. In the abstract it was the living, breathing symbol of the
relentless progress of America's mighty effort, a tangible sign of the
fact that her aid to the Allies would not arrive too late. What it stood
for concretely is best expressed in the words of the young R.N.R.
sub-lieutenant who was officer of the watch at the time.

"It looks to me," he said, with a pleased smile, as he lowered his glass
after a long scrutiny of the advancing lines of ships, "as though
there'd be jolly near forty thousand new Yanks to be catered for in
Liverpool by to-morrow evening."

"Yes," I said somewhat dubiously, my mind suddenly assailed by a
misgiving awakened by the thousands of yards of torpedo target presented
by the sides of those placidly ploughing ships, "that is, assuming that
they get there safely. But they're only just entering the danger zone
now, and there's a lot of water got to stream under their keels before
they berth in the Mersey.

"I don't know anything about convoys, or the ways of protecting them;
but all the same, it looks to me as though that bunch of troopers would
offer a mark like the map of Ireland to a U-boat, and a lot more
vulnerable one."

Young P---- laughed as he bent, squint-eyed, to take a bearing on a
destroyer zigzagging jauntily with high-flung wake in the van of the
approaching fleet.

"That's what everyone--even an old sailor--says the first time he sights
one of the big transatlantic convoys," he said; "and if there are any
skippers new to the job in that lot there, that's just what _they're_
saying. It's all through failure to appreciate--indeed, no one who has
not seen the ins and outs of it would be in a position to
appreciate--the effec