At the table we did not waste much time on etiquette. To wash your face for breakfast during a gale was considered a decided economic disutility, and we didn’t care what place we occupied just so we got a mouthful of grub. But one thing was always insisted on, and that was for a man to remove his headgear at meals. It didn’t make any difference whether a fellow had any pants on or not, but he must not presume to wear a white hat or a watch-cap. All hands would howl him out of the compartment. The foregoing fragment of a deep-sea idyll is included in a war story of the _Reid_ destroyer as deftly compiled by George M. Beatty, Jr., one of that dashing crew, and published with the title, “Seventy Thousand Miles on a Submarine Destroyer.” This young man was heartless enough to print in the volume a ballad of his own devising which had such things as these to say of the author of this chronicle of the _Corsair_: “Grim Father Neptune has his throne In the Bay of Biscay, all alone, And on the day of which we speak, He served out weather rough and bleak; He sent us hail and he sent us rain, And ’twas not long ere Ralph D. Paine Did hie himself to the skipper’s bunk And swear the writing game was punk.” Soon after the flotilla of coal-burners came to Brest, the whole scheme of American naval operations in France took on a new aspect with the arrival of Rear-Admiral Henry B. Wilson. He was the man to perceive the vital need of expansion and to create the organization so urgently required. Outspoken yet tactful, with the hearty affability of a sailor and the energy of a captain of industry, Admiral Wilson proceeded to build upon the surmise that the war might last three years and demand an American army of four million men. The pulse of the service quickened and the response was loyal and instant. It was not long before the executive offices of the Admiral and his staff, in a tall building of Brest, resembled the headquarters of a busy firm in Wall Street. It was the centre of a network of communication by wire and radio with the entire shore-line of France, from Dunkirk to the edge of Spain, and with the Allied naval chiefs of Paris, London, and Washington. The _Corsair_ received her orders and did as she was told, but guiding her movements was the complex and far-flung activity of the secret intelligences which revealed only the deductions and the results. The Admiral’s changing charts were dotted with tiny flags and lines of red ink which recorded, hour by hour, the track of every German submarine that stole seaward from Zeebrugge, and the plodding courses of every Allied convoy that steered in hopes of a safe haven. The decoding room unravelled the messages that whispered by day and night from a hundred sources, or caught and read the German ciphers that were sent to the U-boat skippers far out at sea.