A week later another surprising feat was accomplished. Proceeding in convoy 400 miles from the French coast, the _West Bridge_, on August 15, stripped her main turbine and lay helpless. She had hardly sent a radio to Brest, asking assistance, when the convoy was attacked by a submarine. The _Montanan_ was torpedoed, and after she went down, the U-boat turned its attention to the _West Bridge_. Struck by two torpedoes, she was apparently about to founder. But the destroyer _Smith_ went to her aid, and a volunteer crew under Lieutenant R. L. Connolly went aboard the disabled steamer. There was no possibility of raising steam. She had to be steered by hand. Eventually four tugs arrived and with the yacht _Isabel_ started to tow. The well-deck forward of the ship's bridge was flush with the sea, the waves broke over her in a constant roar. Holds, engine and fire rooms were flooded. Keeping her afloat and keeping her moving was slow and hard work. For five days and nights those men struggled to save that ship, and at last they got her to port. When she reached Brest they beached her on a flat. The officers who examined her for repairs declared she did not have a hundred tons of positive buoyancy, hardly enough to keep her up an hour. Yet those Navy men had kept her afloat for five days and pulled her four hundred miles to port! The spirit of America in Europe, its high ideals, the attitude of officers and men could not have been better expressed than in this open letter of Admiral Wilson to the forces under his command in France: We are guests in the house of another people. Our home will be judged by our conduct in theirs. We still live under the rules, laws, and spirit of the place from which we come. Every great nation in history has stood for some one definite idea: Greece for beauty, Rome for law, Israel for religion. America, in the eyes of the world, stands preëminently for freedom and the ideal of manhood. We must not shake that opinion but do all that we can to strengthen it. We have come to this side of the world to record, by the indelible imprint of arms, our protest against that which is brutal, wicked, and unjust, to give expression to that measure of indignation stirred in the hearts of America by the deeds of terror which the enemy has written across the face of France. Our Nation stands for everything that is contrary to the spirit of arrogant power and tyranny. Let us prove that by our lives here. The only history of America that many of the people of Europe will ever read is that which is recorded by our lives. Live here the proud, manly existence that is justly expected. Be courteous, temperate and self-controlled.