and homeward flight.

"It is regretted that all the eighty-eight officers and men of
H.M.S. _Mary Rose_ and forty-seven officers and men of H.M.S.
_Strongbow_ were lost. All the next-of-kin have been informed."

A few days later a second Admiralty report announced that ten survivors
of the _Mary Rose_ had reached Norway in an open boat, and also gave a
few further particulars of the action in which she had been lost. From
this it appeared that she had been many miles ahead of the main convoy
when the latter was attacked, and that, possessed of the speed, with
many knots to spare, to have avoided an action in which the odds were a
thousand to one against her, she had yet deliberately steamed back and
thrown down the gage of battle to the heavily armed German cruisers.
Just why her captain chose the course he did was not, and never will be,
fully explained. He went down with his ship, and to none of those who
survived had he disclosed what was in his mind. It was certainly not
"war," the critics said, but they also agreed that it was "magnificent"
enough to furnish the one ray of brightness striking athwart the sombre
gloom of the whole disheartening tragedy. "He held on unflinchingly,"
concluded an all-too-brief story of the action issued to the public
through the Admiralty, some time later, "and he died, leaving to the
annals of his service an episode not less glorious than that in which
Sir Richard Grenville perished."

From the time I read these Admiralty announcements I had the feeling
that some, if not all, of those ten survivors of the _Mary Rose_ would
surely be able to offer more of an explanation of why her captain took
her into battle against such hopeless odds than any that had yet been
suggested to the public, and in the months which followed I made what
endeavour I could to locate and have a talk with one of them. It was not
long before the ten were scattered in as many different ships, however,
and though I had the names and official numbers of two or three, almost
a year went by before I chanced upon the first of them. Indeed, it was
but a day or two previous to the first anniversary of the loss of the
_Mary Rose_ and _Strongbow_ and the destruction of the Norwegian convoy
that, in the course of a visit to a Submarine Depot Ship at one of the
East Coast bases, I sauntered forward one evening and fell into
conversation with a sturdily built, steady-eyed young seaman--some kind
of torpedo ra