"It was rather disappointing in a way, having her go down like that, for as things had turned out, it was a hundred to one we should otherwise have captured her almost unharmed. There was a good deal of solace, however, in the fact that none of the Huns were getting back to tell what happened to them, so that this identical stunt was left open for use again. As a matter of fact, variations of it were used a number of times, by one kind of craft or another, before an unlucky slip-up--the one which finished poor R----, by the way--gave the game away and started us veering off on other tacks. I have had a number of successes since that time," concluded K----, pouring me a glass of the yacht's 1835 Cognac as a night cap, "but never a one which was quite so much like taking candy from a child as that 'opener.'" CHAPTER X THE _WHACK_ AND THE _SMACK_ There was always a strange and distinctive fascination to me in standing on the bridge of one ship and watching other ships--and especially lines of ships--push up and sharpen to shape above the edge of the sea. This feeling, strong enough in ordinary times--when it was but a peaceful merchantman one watched from and but peaceful merchantmen that one saw--is intensified manifold when it is a warship's bridge one paces, and only the silhouettes of ships of war that notch the far horizon. Battleship, battle cruiser, light cruiser, destroyer, sloop, trawler, and all the other kinds and classes of patrol craft--each has its own distinctive smudge of smoke, its own peculiar way of revealing its identity by a blurred foretop, funnel, or superstructure long before its hull has lifted its amorphous mass above the sky-line. And now to the sky-line riddles one was given to read, and to be thrilled by as the puzzle revealed itself, had been added the great troop convoy from America, my first sight of one of which was just unfolding. H.M.S. _Buzz_, in which I chanced to be out at the time, was not one of the escorting destroyers, and it was only by accident that the course she was steering to join up with a couple of other ships of her flotilla on some kind of "hunting" stunt took her across that of the convoy, and passed it in inspiring panoramic review before our eyes. From dusky blurs of smoke trailing low along the horizon, ship after ship--from ex-floating palaces with famous names to angular craft of strange design which were evidently the latest word in standardised construction--they rose out of the sea (as our quartering course brought us nearer) until a wide angle of our seaward view was blocked by an almost solid wall of steadily steaming steel.