When they had emptied out our stuff at Brest, the _Pamir_ waited a day at the outside and was sent to Norway to look for wood in the shape of planks and joists. I guess there aren’t any boats to spare now, although the papers say that there are a hundred thousand arrivals and departures each week and that the submarine war has proved a fiasco for the Boches. At the beginning of the war they never minded letting the _Pamir_ slack it in port for eight or ten days. But now we’re on the go all the time. All the other fellows we have seen are hard at it, too. It will go on as long as it can and then, at some given moment, the whole show will stop. And then they’ll begin to cut down the food and coal of the country a bit, and then a bit more, and a bit more still, while we shall continue to be sent to the bottom. If this would open their eyes at home to the importance of the Merchant Service and the need of giving it protection, that would be something! But you’ll see they’ll make the people swallow some fresh lie! France is not a maritime country and will always let herself be humbugged about the sea. But I am anticipating and talking as though the Boche blockade had already been declared at that time, whereas it has only come about since we reached Norway. So then, we left Brest. We were ordered to sail by way of the Irish Channel, an old acquaintance of ours since the war. In the English Channel, about ten o’clock in the morning, straight ahead of the _Pamir_ I saw a mine which must have become detached from the bottom and which was drifting like a dam’ log. If this had happened at night, old man, I should not be writing to you nor would any of the rest on board, because it was enough to blow up four _Pamirs_ put together. I put the helm over. We looked at the mine and admired it and that was all. No gun to send it to the bottom! No wireless with which to inform the authorities at Liverpool of the existence of said mine! But as we had to take aboard some “spares” at Birkenhead we anchored in the Mersey. Unfortunately, Fourgues telegraphed the owner that he was in Liverpool, and the owner, who never loses a chance to feather his nest, answered that he must wait forty-eight hours in order to take freight that was urgently needed in Norway. This feverishly awaited freight, old man, was wagon-loads and mountains of sugar, preserves, and jams. It seems that in Norway they aren’t afraid to buy things that are worth their weight in gold in France. If you want my opinion, I will say that thin Norwegians won’t get any stouter on that cargo. Farther south there are gaping mouths and it’s for them we shall have worked! You can fool some people _all_ the time! The Allies’ blockade is like a net with broken meshes, here just as in Greece and other places. But that’s another story.