"He might get his hide holed by gunfire, he might get split open by a depth-charge, he might get rammed, and he might get several other things. With all the luck in his favour, he might even get a transport. But there's one thing I can assure you he wouldn't get--and that's back to his base. There may be two or three bearings from which one of these big convoys appears to present a mark as wide and unbroken as the map of Ireland; but there's nothing in heaven or earth to save the Fritz who hasn't learned by the sad example of no small number of his mates that it is quick suicide for him to slip a mouldie down one of them." "You mean that he doesn't try it? that he's afraid to take the chance?" I asked somewhat incredulously, for I had somehow come to regard Fritz, though a pirate, as a dashing and daring one when the stake was high enough. "Except under very favourable circumstances, yes," was the reply; "and now that, with the coming of the American destroyers and patrol boats, we are able to do the thing the way we want to, what Fritz might reckon as 'very favourable circumstances' are becoming increasingly fewer and farther between. Now a few months ago, when we were just getting the convoy system under weigh, and when there was a shortage of every kind of screening craft, things were different. Fritz's _moral_ was better then than it is now, and we didn't have the means of shaking it that we have piled up since. At our first convoys, straggling and little schooled in looking after themselves, he used to take a chance as often as not, if he happened to sight them; but even then he rarely got back to tell what happened to him. There was the one that tried to celebrate the advent of 'Peace-on-Earth-Good-Will-to-Men' last Christmas Day by sinking the _Amperi_, which was one of a convoy the _Whack_ (in which I was Number Two at the time) was helping to escort. Well, I couldn't say much for his 'Good-Will-toward-Men,' but he certainly found a short cut to 'Peace-on-Earth,' or at least the bottom of the sea. "Now that chap took a real sporting chance, and got his reward for it--both ways. I mean to say, that he sunk the ship he went after all right--which was his reward one way; and that we then sunk him--which was his reward the other way. There was a funny coincidence in connection with that little episode which might amuse you. We were----" He paused for a moment while he spelled out for himself the "Visual" which one of the escorting destroyers was flashing to the convoy leader, but presently, with a smile of pleased reminiscence, took up the thread of his yarn. This is the story that young Sub-Lieutenant P----, R.N.R., told me the while we leaned on the lee rail of the bridge and watched the passing of those miles-long lines of packed troopers as, silently sure of purpose, superbly contemptuous of danger, they steamed steadily on to deliver their cargoes of human freight one step further towards the fulfilment of its destiny.