s job, early one morning, each boat taking her
chosen section of landscape. Thrice E14 rose to fire, thinking she
saw the dust of feet, but "each time it turned out to be bullocks."
When the shelling was ended "I think the troops marching along that
road must have been delayed and a good many killed." The Turks got up
a field-gun in the course of the afternoon--your true believer never
hurries--which out-ranged both boats, and they left accordingly.

The next day she changed billets with E11, who had the luck to pick up
and put down a battleship close to Gallipoli. It turned out to be the
_Barbarossa_. Meantime E14 got a 5000-ton supply ship, and later had
to burn a sailing ship loaded with 200 bales of leaf and cut
tobacco--Turkish tobacco! Small wonder that E11 "came alongside that
afternoon and remained for an hour"--probably making cigarettes.

REFITTING UNDER DIFFICULTIES

Then E14 went back to her base. She had a hellish time among the
Dardanelles nets; was, of course, fired at by the forts, just missed a
torpedo from the beach, scraped a mine, and when she had time to take
stock found electric mine-wires twisted round her propellers and all
her hull scraped and scored with wire marks. But that, again, was only
in the day's work. The point she insisted upon was that she had been
for seventy days in the Sea of Marmara with no securer base for refit
than the centre of the same, and during all that while she had not had
"any engine-room defect which has not been put right by the
engine-room staff of the boat." The commander and the third officer
went sick for a while; the first lieutenant got gastro-enteritis and
was in bed (if you could see that bed!) "for the remainder of our stay
in the Sea of Marmara," but "this boat has never been out of running
order." The credit is ascribed to "the excellence of my chief
engine-room artificer, James Hollier Hague, O.N. 227715," whose name
is duly submitted to the authorities "for your consideration for
advancement to the rank of warrant officer."

Seventy days of every conceivable sort of risk, within and without, in
a boat which is all engine-room, except where she is sick-bay; twelve
thousand miles covered since last overhaul and "never out of running
order"--thanks to Mr. Hague. Such artists as he are the kind of
engine-room artificers that commanders intrigue to get hold of--each
for his own boat--and when the tales are told in the Trade, their
names, like Abou Ben A