The French coast was compelled to do the best it could with the cards that were dealt. There was no such thing as discouragement in the _Corsair_ or her sister ships, but the feeling grew that the job was vastly bigger than the resources. It was singularly cheering, therefore, when the flotilla of veteran coal-burning destroyers came storming in from the Azores, all stripped and taut and ready for business, looking for trouble and unhappy until they could find it. They became close kindred of the yachts, sharing the rough weather cruises with the convoys and, when in port, taking their doses of the dirty, back-breaking work of eternally shovelling coal in little baskets. And by the same token, their men wore the common mark of the trade, the shadows of grime beneath the eyes which soap and water could never entirely remove. Yachts and destroyers took orders from each other at sea and seldom disagreed. The authority depended upon which commander held the senior naval rank to qualify him to direct the movements of the patrol division. _Reid_, _Smith_, _Flusser_, _Lamson_, and _Preston_, they were rated as no longer young and in size were lightly referred to as the “flivver” class when compared with the thousand-ton destroyers operating out of Queenstown, while bets were made that a winter in the Bay of Biscay would be too much for them. But they stood the gaff and sailed home again after the war, while the unterrified crews bragged of the merits of their sturdy boats and forgot all the hardships. Like the yachts they had a sprinkling of college rookies among the bluejackets, and of Reserve officers on the bridge, while the Regular Navy leavened the lump. [Illustration: BUCKING INTO THE WINTER SEAS] [Illustration: SHE TAKES ’EM ABOARD GREEN] When the November winds began to show their temper, blowing strong from the west and north, the _Corsair_ had a foretaste of what the winter service would be like. There happened to be no one aboard who took the trouble to set down on paper, in diaries or letters home, just what the life was in the crowded compartments below decks when the ship was bucking and rolling five hundred miles offshore and the combers toppled green over the bows. In the _Reid_ destroyer, however, was a young lawyer from Wisconsin, Timothy Brown, who was not only a very able seaman, but also something of an artist with a pen, and he managed to convey very adequately what all these young mariners put up with in order to make the seas safe for democracy. Almost word for word, he might have been writing of the _Corsair_: