At Argostoli, where they sent us to empty our holds for the battleships which were there, we kept on thinking the same things. Crews and young officers are bored to death and eating their hearts out in their longing for active service, the only service possible nowadays for men in the Navy--submarine-chasing in little boats! Ah, well, you bet that wouldn’t suit everybody. So, to make it look as though they were doing something, they keep up a lot of drill, as in time of peace. There it is! But what do you expect? There isn’t any war for them except that perhaps they may be torpedoed, and, of course, they must look as though they were of some use! So here is another French force lying bottled up and one of prime quality--nothing but beefy great chaps who ask only to leave their ships and go into danger! They aren’t like the fellows who want to get out of the trenches in order to make money far from the madding shells. Sailors would like to go on the real sea and just be paid as much as before. But whether they want to or not, it’s all the same. Communications are cut off between them and France, where no one knows a thing about the Navy and cares as little about it as the moon. You should have seen how they fairly rushed us at Argostoli to get the latest news of Athens and the Fleet, from which we had come, straight! They know nothing here, or almost nothing. So at first, Fourgues, Villiers, and I began to roll off our first-hand information, believing that they asked questions in order to know. Not at all, old chap. All the Brass Hats opened their eyes as big as saucers and then told us to hold our tongues about it. France can let a hundred men and six officers be killed like rats in a trap, but no one must say how it was done. So Fourgues and the two of us shut up tight, and we replied to the young’uns, who knew bits of the story, that we had not the right to tell what we knew. So there you have us playing the censor, old man! It fits us about as well as gloves on a turtle! But as adventures are the forming influence of youth, after this business I understand the censorship, though I never understood it before, and used to ask myself why a country like France should not be told the truth. The censorship, old man, is to keep people from developing heart disease. Not the people at the front or on the sea, who couldn’t be any sicker after hearing the truth than they are after a shell or a torpedo, but the jacks-in-office who get advancement or a reputation through the war and who don’t want to have their noses rubbed in their little mishaps. But to think that a country like ours, where everyone goes laughing to the slaughter, should be treated like that to cover the tracks of a pack of incompetents! It’s enough to make you laugh till the Day of Judgment!