I had heard the story in Taranto a year previously, and knew it to be somewhat apocryphal at best. "I didn't mean that kind of 'slap-bang,'" I said. "I was under the impression that the destroyers had some rather lively work down there on one or two occasions." "There were several brushes which might have been called lively while they lasted," he admitted. "I was in one of them myself just before I was transferred north." "You don't mean the recent attack on the drifter patrol--the one where two British destroyers stood the brunt of the attack of four Austrian destroyers and a light cruiser or two?" I asked. "I have always wanted to hear about that. I've heard Italian naval men say some very flattering things of the way the British carried on." "That's the one," he replied. "I was in the _Flop_--the one that got rather the worst banging up." "You've just got time for the yarn before your watch is over," I said, settling myself into the nearest thing to a listening attitude that one can assume on the bridge of a destroyer bucking a north-east gale. "Fire away." I didn't much expect he would "come through," for I had failed in so many attempts to draw a good yarn by a frontal attack of this kind that I had little faith in it as compared with more subtle methods. Perhaps it was because rough methods were suited to the rough night; or it may have been only because K----'s mind (his non-working mind, I mean; not that closed compartment of sense and instinct with which he was directing his ship) had drifted back to the Adriatic, and he was glad of the chance to talk about it; at any rate, in the hour that had still to go before eight bells went for midnight, to the accompaniment of the banging of the seas on the bows and the obbligato of the spray beating on the glass and canvas of the screens, he told me the story I asked for. "I don't need to tell you," he said, after giving the man at the wheel the course for the next zigzag, "that the Adriatic is full of various and sundry little traps and contrivances calculated to interfere as much as possible with the even tenor of the way of the Austrian U-boats which, basing at Pola and Trieste, sally forth in an endeavour to penetrate the Straits of Otranto and attack the commerce of the Mediterranean. You doubtless also know that this work is very largely in British hands. This is no reflection whatever on our Italian ally. Italy simply did not have the material and the trained men for the task in hand, and since Britain had both, it was naturally up to us to step in and take it over. This was done over two years ago; but, like the anti-submarine work everywhere, it is only now just beginning to round into shape to effect its ends. The winter of his discontent for the U-boat in these waters is closing in fast.