o fast on a ship, and I was fifteen years younger then. We bounced
off each other. We did not stop to talk when we straightened out. He went
his way and I went mine, and if I looked anything like him, then my jaw
was thrust out and my eyes had an earnest look in them.

My life-belt was under my bunk. It did not stay there long. I went back
down the passageway jumping. There was a fine crush going up to the
boat-deck. Only a seagoing man knows how to take a ship's ladder with
speed. You just got to have practice at it. There were some fine
athletic boys among the troopers, but "Sweet mother," wailed a ship's
man, "are those new army shoes made of leather, or are they lead that
they move so slow?" And that comment did not have to travel a lonesome
road.

While scooting up the ladder we heard a gun; and another gun. As we made
the boat-deck there was another ship barking out six short blasts.

The ships of the fleet, when we got to where we could see them, were
headed every which way. We could feel our own ship heel over--she turned
so sharply. Every ship in the fleet was going it--right angles, quarter
angles, all degrees of angles. But what impressed us most--we almost
laughed to see her--was the lubber of the fleet. She was twice the tonnage
of most of us, and early in the run across she had brought anguish to our
souls by the way she lagged. "You bum, you loafer, you old cart-horse, why
don't you move up?" our soldiers used to yell across at her. She had not
then enough men in her steam department to keep her engines warm, so she
reported. But now she had steam enough. She was wide and high, a huge hulk
of a ship, and here she was now charging--charging was the word--like a
motor-boat at where somebody said the U-boat had just submerged. Whether
she got her U-boat, I don't know; but she certainly did cut through the
water for about a mile.

The ship next behind us went after something; and the ship next ahead
went tearing away after something else, and another ship--but, man, a
battalion of eyes could not follow them all. A destroyer went--zizz-sh
zizz--a thirty-odd knot clip--and the next thing we saw was a ten-foot
column of solid white water shooting straight up beside that destroyer.

And then came the terrific Bo-o-om! Our ship shook from one end to the
other. I thought it came from inside of us--that it was a loading-port
door let drop by some careless ship's man below. The ship's officer in
charge of our lif