Ah! And what of the destroyers? There they all were, the faithful sheep-dogs, when I came up, and at first blush I got the impression that they were making rather better weather of it than the battleships. That this was only an optical illusion (caused by the fact that they were farther away and more or less obscured by the waves) I discovered as soon as I climbed to the vantage of the after super-structure, and put my glass upon the nearest of the bobbing silhouettes of mast and funnel. Then I saw at once, though not, indeed, any such spray clouds or cascades of solid water as marked the course of the battleships, that she was plainly a labouring ship. A destroyer is not made to pulverise a wave in the bull-at-a-gate fashion of a battleship, and any exigency that compels her to adopt that method of progression is likely to be attended by serious consequences. If one of the modern type she will ride out almost any storm that blows if left to her own devices; but force her into it at anything above half-speed, and it is asking for trouble. Even before the destroyer I was watching began disappearing--hull, funnels, and all but the mastheads--between crest and crest of the onrushing waves, it was plain that both she and her sisters were having all they wanted; and I was not surprised when word was flashed to us that one of our brave little watch-dogs was suffering from a wave-smashed steering geer, and had asked permission to make for port if necessary. The permission was, I believe, granted, but--carrying on with some sort of a makeshift or other--her plucky skipper managed to stick it out and see the game through to the end. There were a number of other ships in difficulties in that neck of the North Sea at this moment, and every now and then--by the wireless--word would come to us from one of them. Mostly they were beyond the horizon, but two were in sight. One (two smoke-blackened "jiggers" and a bobbing funnel-top beneath a bituminous blur to the east) was apparently a thousand-ton freighter. An officer told me that she had been signalling persistently since daybreak for assistance; but when I asked him if we were not going to help her, he greeted the question with an indulgent smile. "Assistance will go to her in due course," he said, "but it will not be from us. That kind of a thing might have been done in the first month or two of the war, but the Huns soon made it impossible. Now, any battleship that would detach a destroyer at the call of any ship of doubtful identity would be considered as deliberately asking for what she might jolly well get--a torpedo."