Since my last the _Pamir_ has called at Baltimore, New York, Brest, Cardiff, Genoa, and Naples. We haven’t lost any time, you see. We almost went back to America to carry steel and shells again, but at the last moment we were ordered to carry food to Italy. So here we are under Vesuvius, and there’s nothing left for us now but to die, as the saying is. But I am not anxious to do that, for Fourgues has just written a strong letter to the Company saying that the _Pamir_ must go into dry-dock considering how long she has been knocking about, especially as we hit something hard off the coast of England and he wants to know what happened, as we are getting water into the hold to the tune of about a foot a day and have to keep pumping all the time. So I hope we are going back to France to be careened. As that will take eight or ten days, Fourgues has promised that I shall be free for the civil registry and the church. So there’s something good. We didn’t take our steel from Baltimore after all. It hadn’t arrived. Depend on the Boches to organize strikes in factories, accidents on railroads, and cars gone astray! Anyway, Fourgues learned, knocking around here and there--but _not_ from the Consular authorities--that, although there was no steel for us at Baltimore, there was heaps of it in New York rusting on the wharves waiting for someone to take it. So he upped and went and the _Pamir_ anchored near Brooklyn Bridge and we took in three thousand tons of steel and a bit more piled on the deck. Fourgues, you may bet your neck, didn’t go at it by halves and only regretted that he couldn’t carry ten thousand tons. The _Pamir_ was as full as she could safely stick it, and crawled like a tortoise in a nasty summer sea, which was anything but pleasant. However, we didn’t care a damn because this time we really were being of some use. In New York, during a beano round Broadway and the swell district with Villiers, Fourgues ran into old Flannigan. I told you about meeting him in Norway last year. They all came on board in the middle of the night, a bit the worse for wear, making noise enough to waken the dead, carrying a gramophone they had pinched in a bar. They set to playing cake-walks and nigger-songs on the records which they had also pinched, and I got up at two o’clock because sleep was no longer possible. As Flannigan was to leave the next morning for the Scandinavian countries, or, as he said, going to make a trip in _Bochie_, he stayed on board until six or seven, drinking Dubonnet and seltzer by way of swabbing down his throat and relating his campaigns to Fourgues and Villiers, who poured down quarts and quarts of Vichy to wash out all the drugs they had put away in the saloons.