tiveness of the whole anti-submarine scheme, and,
especially, what almost complete protection thoroughly up-to-the-minute
screening--with adequate destroyers and other light craft--really
affords. As a matter of fact, every soldier in that convoy is probably a
good deal safer now--and right on in through this so-called danger zone
to harbour--than he was marching down Broadway to the pier--at least, if
Broadway is like it was when I used to put in to New York as a kid in
the _Baltic_."

"But will you tell me," I protested, "how a U-boat, firing two or three
torpedoes from, say, just about where we are now, could possibly miss a
mark like that?"

"Well, it would take a bit of missing from hereabouts, I admit," was the
reply; "only, if there is any Fritz still in the game with the nerve to
try it, he would also be missing himself."

"What would happen to him?" I asked.

"One or all of two or three things might happen,----" P---- answered,
after ordering a point or two alteration in course to give safe berth to
the nearing destroyer.

"He might get his hide holed by gunfire, he might get split open by a
depth-charge, he might get rammed, and he might get several other
things. With all the luck in his favour, he might even get a transport.
But there's one thing I can assure you he wouldn't get--and that's back
to his base. There may be two or three bearings from which one of these
big convoys appears to present a mark as wide and unbroken as the map of
Ireland; but there's nothing in heaven or earth to save the Fritz who
hasn't learned by the sad example of no small number of his mates that
it is quick suicide for him to slip a mouldie down one of them."

"You mean that he doesn't try it? that he's afraid to take the chance?"
I asked somewhat incredulously, for I had somehow come to regard Fritz,
though a pirate, as a dashing and daring one when the stake was high
enough.

"Except under very favourable circumstances, yes," was the reply; "and
now that, with the coming of the American destroyers and patrol boats,
we are able to do the thing the way we want to, what Fritz might reckon
as 'very favourable circumstances' are becoming increasingly fewer and
farther between. Now a few months ago, when we were just getting the
convoy system under weigh, and when there was a shortage of every kind
of screening craft, things were different. Fritz's _moral_ was better
then than it is now, and we didn't have the means of shaki