The story of Seaman Arthur Coffey is less exaggerated than might have been expected in these wholly novel circumstances. It may have been a torpedo or, perchance, it was a porpoise that was seen from the _Corsair_. If it was the latter, no blame is to be laid to the young sailors who were so tremendously excited. To their unaccustomed eyes the ocean swarmed with periscopes and U-boats. Many a seasoned skipper had blazed away at blackfish or shivered in his shoes at a bit of floating spar. The destroyer _Cummings_, at any rate, blew up something from the vasty deep with the “ash can” that plopped from her fan-tail. As for the soldiers packed in the transports, all girdled with life-belts and eyeing the ocean with morbid suspicion, they would have told you that the submarines were coming at them in droves. It was one of the dauntless doughboys of this First Expeditionary Force who wrote home to his trustful kindred: DEAR MOTHER AND THE FOLKS: We hadn’t more than got out of New York than you could see submarines bobbing up all around us. The periscopes were as thick as cat-tails in a swamp. I counted seventy-five and then the ships began to fire. The gunner near me fainted. Shell shock, I guess. I sprang to the gun and began shooting. The first shot I fired hit a submarine square on top of the back and tore out its whole back-bone, just like tearing out a whale’s back-bone. There was blood all over the water, and some oil. I kept on shooting. I sank twelve of the submarines myself. The battle lasted a good while and I heard that fifty of the submarines had been destroyed. None of us was killed. The submarines, what was left, finally quit us. We haven’t seen any more of them. Give this to the newspapers. Love to all the folks, from your soldier boy BILL At this early period of the naval war, the employment of the depth charge as the most efficient weapon against the submarine had not been fully developed. The traditions of accurate gunfire as the best offensive were not easily set aside. It was true of the destroyers at Queenstown, as of these yachts bound to France, that their crews felt sublimely certain of smashing Fritz with the batteries at which they drilled like so many skilled football teams. Soon they came to realize, however, that the chance of catching the enemy napping on the surface was extremely remote and that shooting at periscopes, even when they were not imaginary, was futile business.