"Turning to port took us over into the line of the other Division, and the first thing I knew the _Seagull_ had poked in and taken station astern of the _Bow_, which was leading it. Just then some Hun ship, I think it was the same one that strafed the _Killarney_, opened on the _Bow_ from starboard, the bursting shell splashing all over her from the funnels right for'ard. _Bow_ turned sharp to port to try to shake off the searchlights, and _Seagull_ altered at same time to keep from turning in her wake and running into the shells she was side-stepping. All of a sudden I saw another destroyer steering right across our bows, and to keep from ramming her the captain altered back to starboard. That cleared her stern by an eyelash, but the next second I saw that it was now only a question of whether _Seagull_ would ram _Bow_, or _Bow_ would ram _Seagull_. How a dished and done-for quartermaster, falling across his wheel as he died, decided it in favour of _Bow_ I did not learn till later. "The Hun shells were tearing up the water astern of the _Bow_ for half a minute as she began to close us; then they stopped, and the smash came at the end of five or ten seconds of dead quiet. It was pitchy dark, with the flicker of fires on the deck of the _Bow_ making trembly red splotches in the smoke and steam. A sight I saw by the light of one of those fires just before the wallop is my main memory of all the hell I saw in the next quarter hour. It has lasted just as if it was burned into my brain with a hot iron, and it figures in one way or other in every nightmare I've had since." The humorous twinkle in the corner of the man's eye, which had persisted during all of his recital up to this point, suddenly died out, and he was staring into nothingness straight ahead of him, where the picture his memory conjured up seemed to hang in projection.