_June 6th._ Spent the morning overside, scrubbing the ship. At one o’clock we hove anchor and cruised down to Staten Island. There are eleven warships here with us.... _7th._ Coaled ship all day at the Navy Yard. Filled the bunkers and then put thirty tons on deck in bags. The ship was a holy mess. Before breakfast we were over the side scrubbing.... _8th._ Spent most of the day washing the whole ship. We left the Navy Yard and are tied to a dock at the foot of 80th Street in the Hudson River. The _Seattle_, _Birmingham_, and the _Aphrodite_ are anchored near us. Got paid $13.00 to-day. So much money makes me dizzy. _June 11th._ I got what amounts to a promotion. I am signal-man on the bridge. I handle all the signals, flags, semaphore, blinker, and searchlights, excepting radio. It lets me out of all the hard deck work. It will take lots of practice to make good, but I am coming along fairly well.... _12th._ Three large transports are anchored off us, crowded with regular infantry. We hear we are to convoy them across. We shall be starting very soon. The dope is that we are to act as convoy all summer.... _13th._ We are told that there will be no liberty to-night, so that means business. I called up father and he came to see me and said good-bye. The day was spent in putting on the finishing touches for sea. We think we are going over with about thirty other ships. The _Seattle_ is the flagship. There will be cruisers, destroyers, our type of vessel, and the transports.... This young sailor and his comrades were about to take part in one of the most memorable voyages in American history. The crowded transports at which they gazed bore Pershing’s first contingent, the vanguard of an army two million strong. They presaged the enormous flow of troops and material, the bridge of ships which should finally shatter the military power of Germany. There was nothing outwardly dramatic in this sailing of this little fleet of transports. It stole out in secret and no newspaper hinted at its departure. The men in khaki belonged to regular regiments whose names and numbers meant nothing to the people of their country. It was to be the destiny of most of these unknown men to fall, dead or wounded, on the fields of France, but the regiments came back, and then the country knew them as they marched down Fifth Avenue, wildly cheered and pelted with flowers—the stern, bronzed ranks of the First Division. They filled the decks of this first convoy, companies and battalions of the Sixteenth, the Eighteenth, the Twenty-Sixth, and the Twenty-Eighth infantry regiments which were to win glory at tremendous cost in the victorious assaults at Toul, at Cantigny, at Soissons, at Saint-Mihiel, and in the desperate advances of the Meuse and the Argonne.