catch the tide, he affirmed that they would be better prepared: _their_ place in mobilization would be detailed, their duties and services made clear. We knew of no plans for our employment in war service; we had no position allotted to us in measures for emergency. We were sufficiently proud of our seafaring to understand a certain merit in this apparent lack of prevision: we took it as in compliment to the efficiency and resource with which our sea-trade was credited. Was it not on our records that the Isle of Man steamers transported 58,000 people in the daylight hours of an August Bank Holiday. A seventy-mile passage. Trippers. Less amenable to ordered direction than disciplined troops. A day's work, indeed. Unequalled, unbeaten by any record to date in the amazing statistics of the war. There was no need for supervision and direction: we knew our business, we could pick up the tune as we marched. We did. On the outbreak of war we fell into our places in transport of troops and military material with little more ado than in handling our peace-time cargoes. The ship on which the Staff students worked their problems set out on almost the very route they had planned for her, but with no prison or guard-room or hospital, and sixteen hundred troops instead of eleven: the time taken to fit her (including discharge of a cargo) occupied exactly four days. We saw but little of the naval authority. [Illustration: THE D.A.M.S. GUNWHARF AT GLASGOW] Later, in our war work, we made the acquaintance of the naval transport officer. Generally, he was not intimate with the working of merchant ships. His duties were largely those of interpretation. Through him Admiralty passed their orders: it devolved on the mercantile shore staff of the shipping companies to carry these orders into execution. If, in transport services, our marine superintendents and ships' husbands did not share in the honours, it was not for want of merit. They could not complain of lack of work in the early days of the war when the transport officer was serving his apprenticeship to the trade. The absence of a keen knowledge and interest in commercial ship-practice at the transport office made for complex situations; hesitancies and conflicting orders added to the arduous business. Under feverish pressure a ship would be unloaded on to quay space already congested, ballast be contracted for--and delivered; a swarm of carpenters, working day and night, would fit her for carriage of troops. At the eleventh hour some one idly fingering a tide-table would discover that the vessel drew too much water to cross the bar of her intended port of discharge. (The marine superintendent was frequently kept in ignorance of the vessel's intended destination.) Telegraph and telephone are handy--"Requisition cancelled" is easily passed over the wires! _As you were_ is a simple order in official control, but it creates an atmosphere of misdirection almost as deadly as German gas.