"Some of us tried to get aft as soon as we were clear of the _Seagull_, but couldn't make the grade over the wreck of the bridge. As all the officers and men who had been there had either been killed or wounded, or had gone to the after steering position they were now conning her from, we were as much cut off from them as though we were on another craft altogether. All the crews of her fo'c'sl' guns--or such of them as were still alive--were in the same fix. So we just bunched up there in the dark and waited. Some of the wounded were in beastly shape, but there wasn't much to be done for them, even in the way of first aid. Some shipmates of other times drifted together in the darkness, and I remember 'specially--it was while I was trying to tie up some guy's scalp with the sleeve of my shirt--hearing one of them telling another of a wool mat he had just made, all with ravellings from 'Harry Freeman.'[B] Funny how it's the little things like that a man remembers. The gunner whose head I bound up was telling me just how the _Bow_ happened to be strafed, but it went in one ear and out of the other. [Footnote B: The bluejackets' name for knitted woollen gifts from friends on the beach.] "But the queerest thing was me hearing some guy lying all messed up on the deck muttering something about _skookum kluches_, and some more Chinook _wa-wa_ that I knew he couldn't have picked up anywhere else but from serving in a 'T.B.D.' working up and down the old Inland Passage from Vancouver Island. I felt my way to where he was huddled up in the wreck of a smashed gun, told him that I was another _tilicum_ from the 'Squimalt Base, and asked him what ship he had been there in. I knew there was a good chance that we'd been mates in the old _Virago_, and there even seemed a familiar sound to his voice. But I wasn't fated ever to find out. He just kept on muttering, slipping up on some words as if something was wrong with his mouth, and I didn't dare light a match, of course. When I tried to ease him up a bit by lifting so he'd lie straight--well, all of him didn't seem to come along when I started dragging by his shoulders. I never did find what was wrong with him, for right then new troubles of my own set in. "I was still down on my knees trying to locate what was missing with this poor guy, when--out of the corner of my eye, for it was near behind me--I spotted the flash of a ship challenging. _Bow_ challenged back--from somewhere aft--and then what I piped at once for a Hun destroyer switched on searchlights and opened fire. She was about two cables off on our port quarter, heading right for us and blazing away with one or two guns, probably all that would bear on that course. A second destroyer, right astern her, didn't seem to be firing. I heard the bang and saw the flash of two or three shells bursting somewhere amidships, and then the _Bow's_ port after gun began to reply. The crews of all the others were knocked out, and so were the searchlights.