sport--with the exception of aerial
warfare ever devised or developed--that of hunting down in all weathers
over the wide spaces of the Atlantic those modern sea monsters that prey
upon the Allied shipping. For the superdreadnought is reposing behind
the nets, the battle-cruiser ignominiously laying mines; and for the
present at least, until some wizard shall invent a more effective method
of annihilation, victory over Germany depends primarily on the airplane
and the destroyer. At three o'clock one morning I stood on the crowded
deck of an Irish mail-boat watching the full moon riding over Holyhead
Mountain and shimmering on the Irish Sea. A few hours later, in the
early light, I saw the green hills of Killarney against a washed and
clearing sky, the mud-flats beside the railway shining like purple
enamel. All the forenoon, in the train, I travelled through a country
bathed in translucent colours, a country of green pastures dotted over
with white sheep, of banked hedges and perfect trees, of shadowy blue
hills in the high distance. It reminded one of nothing so much as a
stained-glass-window depicting some delectable land of plenty and peace.
And it was Ireland! When at length I arrived at the station of the port
for which I was bound, and which the censor does not permit me to name, I
caught sight of the figure of our Admiral on the platform; and the fact
that I was in Ireland and not in Emmanuel's Land was brought home to me
by the jolting drive we took on an "outside car," the admiral perched
precariously over one wheel and I over the other. Winding up the hill by
narrow roads, we reached the gates of the Admiralty House.

The house sits, as it were, in the emperor's seat of the amphitheatre
of the town, overlooking the panorama of a perfect harbour. A ring of
emerald hills is broken by a little gap to seaward, and in the centre is
a miniature emerald isle. The ships lying at anchor seemed like
children's boats in a pond. To the right, where a river empties in, were
scattered groups of queer, rakish craft, each with four slanting pipes
and a tiny flag floating from her halyards; a flag--as the binoculars
revealed--of crimson bars and stars on a field of blue. These were our
American destroyers. And in the midst of them, swinging to the tide,
were the big "mother ships" we have sent over to nurse them when, after
many days and nights of hazardous work at sea, they have brought their
flock of transports an