During the crossing from Liverpool to Bergen--which I recommend if you like gymnastics, for we never for one moment ceased rolling like the very deuce--Villiers amused himself making calculations according to the ship’s log to see how many miles the _Pamir_ has travelled and how much merchandise she has transported during the thirty months of war. He found that we have been round the world three and a half times and carried between eighty and a hundred million tons of stuff! We might have exceeded the latter figure if we had not made so many voyages in ballast. But, anyway, such as it is, Fourgues said that the _Pamir_ had done her bit. When you think that the biggest cargo boats can double and treble that record and that France needs it all, you can say that the Merchant Service has deserved well of her. Dear old chap, you know that I am not saying this to brag and make out that we are wonderful fellows! All that is very well for Mummy’s darlings who have their photographs taken to put in the papers or for the old buffers who spread themselves in the pubs in Paris. You know the sort who do as little as they can and make the most of it. But we who trudge up and down the earth and carry on without anyone knowing anything about it and who get more kicks than half-pence, without counting torpedoes and mines--and not more than eight days’ leave in port--I wonder what the Allies would have done if we hadn’t been there, right on the job and with our mouths shut? After this if the French people do not come to understand what the Merchant Service represents, all I can say is, their brains need a surgical operation, and there’s nothing for it but to let all our ships rip, and take to agriculture instead. Look at it any way you like: France needs the whole world to help her if she is to win the war, and as there are no railroads to Australia or Argentine or the United States, or to any of the countries which furnish us with raw material, she’d be in the soup without the Merchant Service. But a fat lot she cares about us. There’s no fear of anyone in Paris bothering, and we shall keep on just the same while those gentlemen go right on hypnotising themselves, some with words and the others with bank-notes enough to burst their pockets.