It was my watch, late in the afternoon. I was keeping a sharp lookout when I saw the torpedo scudding toward us. "Wake of a torpedo in starboard bow!" I yelled. Say, that vessel wheeled like a streak--and the torpedo missed. But the next one didn't. Bing!--I felt the big ship quiver under me, and the explosion that followed blew me so high that I came down in the paint locker with my arm under me. You'd think I'd be used to torpedoing by this time, and could keep my sea legs under fire, but I didn't. I'm getting better though, and I'm waiting to get a shot at Fritz that will send him where he'll stay for a while. I certainly am glad every time I hear we've sunk one of them, but I always wish I was one of the crew of that lucky ship. CHIEF NURSE STEVENS SPEAKS: UNDER THE RED CROSS BANNER I WAS educated abroad. That's how I came to love France and England almost as well as my own country. I was in my teens when I returned to America. I had always wanted to be a nurse. Even while at school I longed for the days when I should be old enough to begin training. It was my calling, and, when I left school, I answered it. I trained in France, England and America. I had practised but a short while when I married. My husband was a surgeon, and from him I learned more of nursing than I could ever hoped to have acquired from text-books. We were always together. We played and worked and traveled all over the world. When he died, it was like a great light going out. I did not know where to turn--I did not know what to do. Even to this day I cannot get used to his being away from me. It always seems as though he were on one of his professional trips and would return. And then in 1914, just six months after his death, war came, and I knew that my place was in France, so I sailed at once and enlisted in the nursing corps. Those were the days before the great base hospitals were established--the days when the dead and wounded were left in piles awaiting such care as could be given them by the handful of overworked doctors and nurses. It was there I found my "son." We had come to a group of white-faced boys--the mark of death on their brow. Lying a little apart from the others was a young Frenchman. He had an ugly shrapnel wound on his shoulder. He was unconscious when we found him, but he was so appealing, so young, that my heart went out to him. His clothes were stained with dirt and blood, and the mud was caked on his cheek, where he had fallen. When we moved in, he opened his eyes. "Maman," he said, and smiled at me. I think that was what won me completely. [Illustration: Copyright by International Film Service. Torpedoes cost money--they are often recovered and fired again.]