It looked to me as if the whole ship was thrown bodily out of the water by the sheer force of the explosion and then parted in her middle. As she settled down on the water a great black cloud of smoke poured out of her hold and when the air struck her she caught fire and was soon a solid, seething sheet of flame. It was the most magnificent spectacle I have ever seen from longitude 0 to 70 degrees west of Greenwich and from the Equator to the Pole. Different from the German idea of _kultur_, instead of letting the crew of the _Koln_ drown, the Captain of the _Henrietta_ sent out boats and stood by until all of them were picked up and on board his ship. We then sailed back to our naval base where the German crew was taken off and interned in a concentration camp until the war ended. Their fighting days were over while on the other hand mine had just commenced. CHAPTER XI--WITH THE FIELD ARTILLERY IN FRANCE The strain from being cooped up in the small and stuffy quarters of the _H-24_ was beginning to tell on me and the blind way in which we had to manœuver did not make me care for the life so I bethought me it would be a nice change to get into the flying game. Moreover my arm had begun to pain me considerably at times and so I determined to get a disability discharge. This was not a hard thing to do for any one with a heart need not be told that a man with a game arm should not be made to continue in active service if he didn’t want to. Consequently in February I received my discharge and after seeing my folks I concluded it would be best to have my arm operated on to remove the stiffness. This I did and after the plaster casts that had been around it for a month were removed I was once again the owner of two good, strong, healthy arms and in every way fit for service of any kind should I care to enlist again. To get a commission as a lieutenant in the Flying Corps was not as easy as I thought it would be and I found the whole machinery of making an application so clogged with red-tape that the farthest I was able to get was to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of military authorities as to everything pertaining to myself, parents and even down to the dimensions of my great grandmother’s left ankle. I was simply out of luck! The more I thought about it, though, the more I was determined to get to France where the _big game_ was going on. So one bright May morning I went down to a recruiting station at 42nd Street and 6th Avenue, New York, with an entirely original idea and that was to enlist in the cavalry. I picked the cavalry because I thought the outdoor life would help to build me up and that riding a horse would not make my feet as sore as marching.