“Thunder and blazes!” answered Fourgues. “You call that luck? You mean, it’s enough to make one bash one’s head against the binnacle! It’s worse than you think. After all, I don’t care a damn, we’re among friends and can speak plainly. Will you believe that the Navy has not yet given orders for notices to be posted up on mail and other steamers, telling passengers what to do in case of submarines? So they go on board like sheep, carrying the latest newspaper in which is printed that U-boats are all rot. And when they are torpedoed, it’s butchery, sir, it’s massacre; and there’s nothing to say because if it’s that way, well--that’s the way they want it! And what do you expect them to do, these hundreds of land-lubbers, when the ship begins to rock? No one has told them anything. They don’t know anything. They run around, squealing like pigs, jumping into lifeboats, cutting ropes--and that’s so many drowned to shove down on the account. If a single general treated our soldiers like that, he would be suspended first and then court-martialled.” Do you get Fourgues’ tone? We don’t bother on the _Pamir_ with land affairs and politics. The sea is enough for us. We feel that we are being hunted from day to day and that it comes closer with each voyage, but we can say nothing, do nothing. That’s forbidden!... Oh, I forgot something that Flannigan told us in New York about the crews of the German submarines. The newspapers and the French authorities say that the good German crews have long since been destroyed and that submarine crews can’t be turned out in a day like hot cakes, so we can be easy on that score. Flannigan says that’s all humbug. In the first place, with money one can get what one wants in any country and the Germans pay their submarine crews royally. And then everybody knows that on a submarine there are only two fellows who have to understand the whole business--the captain and the second in command who have charge of the diving and steering. As to the crew, they have mechanics’ jobs, they look after levers, and valves, and so on, just as in any factory, and merely carry out the orders of the two chiefs; they have to turn this, turn that, and so forth. It wouldn’t take forever to learn that! Any mechanic can learn all there is to know in a month and so they have first-rate crews like those on the Zeppelins. There’s only the risk. But I’d like to know in what country danger stops the fellows with nerve? Neither in France nor in _Bochie_! Moreover, Flannigan said, after the submarine crews have drudged for fifteen or twenty days at sea, they are given leave ashore and spend a week or two with their families while other mechanics put the machinery in order. And they are treated like heroes and fêted everywhere, as well as given their part in the prize-money, so that there are more volunteers for the job than they require, just as in the French aviation service--where, of course,