The men’s living spaces right forward had retired to the bottom of the North Sea, and the waves were rolling in, unhindered, against the capstan engine, anchor chain lockers, and foremost mess decks. Yet the ship was still seaworthy, for a transverse bulkhead, which stretches across the ship and runs from the foc’sle deck right down to the keel, was keeping her watertight and preventing other compartments from being flooded—no small advertisement for the efficient work of our Corps of Naval Constructors. The large area of this bulkhead, however, made it impossible to tow the ship bows first, for the pressure against it under such conditions would be tremendous and too much even for the efficiency of her construction. The only alternative, therefore, was to tow her stern first. We knew this would be a fairly difficult operation, for she had already been twice in tow of the destroyer that had originally stood by her and each time the strain of the tow had parted the wires. It was after an hour and a half’s work, by about 3 P.M., that we managed to get our wires into her, for it is no easy task in a seaway when one cannot have a boat, but must steam past as close to the other ship as safety will permit, towing astern of you a small hawser with a cask at the end, which the ship to be towed endeavours to pick up. Then if she gets it you attach to the small hawser a larger hemp hawser, and to that the big wire by which you will tow, one end of which she hauls in and makes fast to herself, whilst you have the other end secured to your stern, and off you go. At least so you should in theory, but in this case we had secured the wire but two or three minutes when a wave lifted us up and simultaneously swung the destroyer’s stern off in an opposite direction, throwing a heavy strain on the wire which forthwith parted; so we had to start again. This time we used the very largest wire we had, which was correspondingly more difficult to handle and harder to get to the destroyer, and not until 6 P.M., just as the light started to fail, were we able to get it to the destroyer. And all this time, you must remember, we made a sitting target for a submarine. The remainder of the squadron were steaming round and round us acting as far as they could as a submarine screen, and individually, I don’t doubt, cursing us heartily for the length of time we were taking. But no enemy craft found us (such opportunities will be missed by fleets which operate in canals), and as twilight settled in we steamed slowly ahead, with rising hopes that this time the tow might hold and that we might succeed in getting her in. Steaming at revolutions ordinarily sufficient to give us eight knots we made good four to five.