It was just as darkness was slowing down our anti-U-boat operations, that a signal came through stating that there were believed to be several survivors still alive among the wreckage of the _Marmora_, and ordering us to proceed to the scene of her sinking with all dispatch. The moon was rising as we began to nose among the pathetic litter of scraps that was all that remained afloat of what, five or six hours previously, had been a swift and beautiful auxiliary cruiser. There was enough light for us to be reasonably sure, at the end of an hour's search, that our mission was in vain; that there remained no living man to pick up. There was something strangely familiar, though, in the lines of a cutter which, in spite of a smashed gunwale, was still afloat, and I was just thinking of how grateful a lee, in the monsoon, the windward side of the old _Marmora's_ lifeboats had furnished for a deck-chair or two, when the captain, advancing the handle of the engine-room telegraph, turned to me with: "We're off to rendezvous with the _Lymptania_ now; I think we can promise you some real excitement in the course of the next day or two." CHAPTER V THE CONVOY GAME The fantastic pile of multi-coloured slabs blotting out a broken patch of sky above the seaward end of the estuary, if it had been on land, might have been anything from a row of hangars, viewed in slant perspective, to the scaffolding of a scenic railway, or a "Goblin's Castle" in Luna Park. But there in the middle of the channel, the mountainous bulk could only be one thing, the _Lymptania_, the ship which our division of American destroyers had been ordered to escort on that part of its westbound voyage in which there was reckoned to be danger of submarine attack. Distorted by the camouflage, the tumbled mass of jumbled colours continued to loom in jagged indefinitiveness as we closed it from astern, and it was only when we had come up well abreast of it that the parts settled down into "ship-shapeliness," and the silhouette of perhaps the most famous of the world's great steamers sharpened against the sunlit afternoon clouds. The change which had been wrought in the appearance of the _Lymptania_ since last I had seen her was almost beyond belief. Then she had been a hospital ship, with everything about her, from snowy whiteness to red crosses in paint and coloured lights, calculated to establish her character, to give her the protection of conspicuousness. Now she sought protection in quite the opposite way. Every trick of scientific camouflage had been employed to render her inconspicuous; while, if that failed, there were the destroyers. The protection of these big liners is a considerable undertaking, but it has its redeeming features. As U-boat bait they are unrivalled, and the number of German submarines which have been sent to the bottom as a direct consequence of attempting to sink one of them will make a long and interesting list when the time comes to publish it.