For some days more we prowled the wet seaways, and then, well along into a night that was foggier, colder, and windier than the one into which we had steamed out, we crept along a heightening headland, nosed in the wake of the flagship through a line of booms, and opened a bay that was dappled with the lights of many ships. A few minutes later, and the raucous grind of a chain running out through a hawse-pipe signalled that we were back at the old stand. And since, like all the rest of our sisters of the Grand Fleet, we were expected to be ready to put to sea on _x_ hours' notice, there was nothing for it but that the several hundred tons of coal which the mighty _Zeus_ had been snorting out in the form of smoke to contaminate the ozone of a very sizeable area of the North Sea should be replenished without delay. A collier edged gingerly out of a whirling snow-squall and moored fast alongside as I groped forward to retake possession of my cabin under the bridge, and I went to sleep that night to the grind of the winches and the steady tramp-tramp of the barrow-pushers on the decks below. A NORTH SEA SWEEP There are four sights in this war that have etched themselves more deeply upon the plates of my memory than any of a hundred others which are themselves unforgettable--my first heavy artillery bombardment in France, with a wallowing wave of men sweeping forward behind the smoke and dust clouds of an advancing barrage, the meteor trail across the northern sky of the first Zeppelin brought down over England, the fantastically foreshortened peaks of southern Macedonia--with Serb and Bulgar locked in death grips in the cockpit of a snow-choked valley--from an aeroplane, and the Grand Fleet taking form out of a North Sea mist on a winter's morning. And it is the last of these--though the only mind picture it has left is of endless lines of grey ships ploughing silently through grey waters to the blending line of sea and misty sky, while the others were pulsing with motion, vibrant with sound and vivid with the incomparable appeal of the drama in which the actors are fighting and falling, living and dying men--that stirs, and will stir, me longest and strongest of all. Just why this is I cannot say, but some hint of it may be found in the fact--so well known to all lovers of the ocean--that with the sea it is more what one _feels_ than what one _sees_ that moves; and with the Grand Fleet, which is instinct with the soul of the sea which it commands, it is perhaps the feeling that a single sweep of the eye comprehends the one mightiest force in mankind's mightiest struggle, which invests those silent lines of steaming warships with a power to stir the imagination (in my own case at least) as nothing else on earth can stir it, nor--save only the sight of those same ships going into action to fulfil the purpose for which they were created--ever will.