not talk English, but they had speaking eyes.
They now looked at the chief, and he went up to have a peek. He came
back soon. "They are having target practice," he told them. He had been
running the Caribbean ports long enough to be able to say that much in
Spanish; but more than all he smiled as he said it. You want to smile to
get away with anything like that in the fire-room of a troop-ship in the
U-boat country.

Every ship in the fleet was now having something to say with her guns;
and with their incessant manoeuvring at such close quarters the sea
was all torn up by their wakes. Two or three wakes or bow waves would
cross each other, and the sea would roll up with a bounding white crest.
There were also the wakes of hidden submarines. You could tell them if
you saw any by the way they did not stop in one place; they moved on.
When a gunner saw a submarine wake he fired; where he wasn't sure he
fired anyway. What was he there for? Bang! Boom! Solid shot were
ricochetting, piling up little white splashes, and the shrapnel were
making little holes and bursting into little white smoke puffs all over
the place.

You must not forget that it was a beautiful day and a perfectly calm sea
with the shore of France looming like a blue mirage on the horizon. It
lasted about forty minutes altogether, and through it all the little
destroyers--don't forget them--were weaving in and out among the big
ships; and on the big ships were thousands of troopers, white life-belts
around their olive-drab uniforms, standing steadily by life-boats and
rafts.

Our fellows on the destroyers did handle their little ships well. And
the troop-ships were handled well--no collisions and no gun-shells going
aboard anybody else. A few went across other people's bows and sterns,
but not too near to worry. And in the middle of it all, our guns made so
much noise that before we heard them we saw them--two airplanes,
whirring and cavorting about and above us. Whenever they saw a destroyer
turn and shoot, they would turn and shoot after the destroyer. They
could move about three times as fast as a destroyer, and so quite often
beat the destroyer to it.

Later the airplanes escorted us into port. They were big, powerful
biplanes, and carried a sky-pointing gun mounted forward and the colors
of France painted on their little wings aft. They kept circling about us
until we made our harbor. Whenever they swooped low enough our troopers
gave them a fine