isconcerted no one can imagine who has not himself experienced it. He
was himself near such a shell when it exploded. It rendered him
unconscious. He was blind for some time, deaf for two weeks, and
suffered from loss of memory for over a month,--and all this without
any surgical wound. He thinks the nervous effect produced by the
explosions at a distance is due in a lesser degree to the same sort of
shock. On one occasion a number of big shells exploded in succession a
hundred yards from a trench; and although no one was wounded or
suffered any physical injury, such was the demoralizing effect of the
nervous shock that all the men in the trench fled and did not recover
balance until they had run a quarter of a mile. Meeting a staff
officer and receiving from him a stiff reprimand they all returned to
their posts. The whole episode took place without any casualties.

[Illustration: THE BRITISH DESTROYER ON THE NORTH SEA
[Just after she "brought us to" with a blank shot]]

I leave for Folkestone this evening, where I spend the night on board
ship. The boat sails for Flushing after daybreak.

* * * * *

_On the North Sea, December 16th._ It has been a wonderful stormy day
today; as an officer said: "a typical North Sea winter day"--a leaden
sky, roaring wind, smothers of rain, great black-green waves all
flecked and blotched in white, big sea birds and little gulls dipping
down the wave valleys and soaring up the wave mountains, and the ship
taking the most foolish and impossible angles. It was an odd thing to
see the gulls which followed the ship, all pointing the other way, in
order to maintain their position relatively to the boat and against
the heavy wind coming up from astern. At lunch the dishes jumped the
racks and smashed along the floor; on the return heave all the
fragments rushed back the entire width of the dining saloon. Eating
was difficult.

Two hours out a British destroyer came dashing up in our wake, making
two feet to our one. She was a most picturesque sight, long, low, and
speedy, painted black; her towering knife-prow thrust out in front
and the long, low hull strung out behind. She "brought us to" with a
shot across the bows, and as we wallowed in the trough of the sea, she
went by to starboard fairly shaving our side. The officer on her
bridge, over which great waves of spray and water broke at every
moment, "looked us over" and then bellowed orders to our Cap