"G---- told us one very good story about his Gunnery officer. 'It was just before the shell which started the fire struck us,' he said, 'that Y----'s sun helmet was knocked off--I don't remember whether it was by the wind or the concussion of the firing. Seeing it fall to the deck below, he ran to the rail of the bridge and began shouting for some one to bring it back to him. Before long, luckily, a seaman who had heard the shouting in a lull of the firing, poked his head out to see what it was about, and presently came puffing up the ladder with the fugitive head-piece. I say _luckily_, because the gun-control for the whole ship was suspended while Y---- waited for that infernal helmet. And the funniest thing about it all was that, when I ventured to suggest a few days later that it might be well if he made use of the chin-strap of his helmet the next time he was in action, he claimed to have no recollection whatever of the incident--thought he had been "sticking to his guns" all the time. Just shows how a man's brain works in air-tight compartments when he is really busy.' "The Surgeon of the _Carmania_ (continued the Captain)--a splendid chap who had given up a lucrative West-end practice and sworn he was under forty (although he was really fifty-two) in order to get a chance to do something for his country--told me many stories to prove the splendid spirit of the men that passed under his hands during and after the fight. Though most of the crew were only Royal Naval Reservists, with no experience of and but little training for fighting, it appears that they stood what is perhaps the hardest of all trials--that of seeing their mates wounded and killed beside them--like seasoned veterans. "'There was one stout-hearted young Cockney,' said the Surgeon, 'whom, after I had finished removing a number of shell fragments from various parts of his anatomy, I asked what he thought of the fight. "Rippin', Sir," he replied, grinning ecstatically through the bandage that held up the flap of a torn cheek; "rippin', never been in one like it before." Then, as his eye caught the smile which I could not quite repress at the lifetime of naval battling suggested by that "nev'r afore," he concluded with "Not ev'n in Whitechapel."' "The Surgeon came across one man who insisted that the blood flowing from a ragged tear in his arm was really spattered there when one of his mates--whose mangled body he bestrode--had been decapitated by a shell a few minutes before; and there was one lot of youngsters who went on cheerily 'Yo-heave-ho-ing' in hoisting some badly needed shells which were so slippery with blood that they had to be sanded before they could be handled. Grimly pathetic was the story he told me of a gunner whose torn hand he had just finished amputating and bandaging when some one shouted into the door of the dressing station that the _Trafalgar_ was going down.