"What U-boat?" he asked. "Oh, the one in the signal. Well, hardly. He knows by long experience that the average U-boat skipper won't take any risks he can avoid with a warship behind a destroyer screen, especially where there is a chance of throwing his mouldies into some merchantmen and drowning a lot of women and children. There is only one thing the Hun is more careful about than his torpedoes, and that is his own thick hide." The waning moon had risen just before midnight, and my last look round before turning in revealed, to port, one line of destroyers--swift, blue-grey arrows--shooting smoothly along in the light of it, and, to starboard, another line of dark shadows silhouetted against the silvered waters to the south-east, with the leader cutting a fluent furrow across the moon-track itself. The "To-ra-loo" of the imperious call to "Action Stations" awoke me before dawn on the following morning, and it was through a tangle of men, hammocks, and unreeling fire-hose, and in the bedlam of clanging water-tight doors and the banging of hurrying feet upon steel ladders, that I wriggled forward and upward toward the fore bridge. The sharp blast which cut my face as I emerged upon the boat deck gave warning that the weather had indulged in one of its sudden overnight changes, and that the day would be one of characteristic North Sea rawness. Ducking through a fluttering string of mounting bunting on the signal bridge, I gained the next ladder and came out upon the fore bridge, with an open view before me at last. Early as it was, Admiral Sturdee was there before me, and wearing no more protection against the penetrating cold than was afforded by an ordinary service cap and uniform, a short overcoat, and a light pair of overshoes. In contrast, I felt almost ashamed of the ponderous duffle coat--a half-inch thick of solid wool, and equipped with a heavy hood--with which I had fortified myself against the weather. "You're just in time," he greeted me cheerily with. "Come and look who's here." It was an ashen grey morning, with a low mist just beginning to thin into luminous strata in the light of the rising sun. Overhead it was clear, with indications good for a brightening all around before long. At first I was conscious of only the ships of our own Squadron, with those of the Second Division steaming hard to close up the "night interval" between them and those of the First. Then, abeam to port, I espied a similar line, and beyond that another and still another. And farther still, slipping ghostily along in the depths of the retreating mist, was even another line. "Shades of Father Neptune!" I gasped. "Do they go on into the Skager Rak? Where did they all come from?"