Nice night-job, that! Not allowed to show a light, not allowed to use the winch, not allowed to shout! Just pitch the stuff over on to the wharf without knowing where it will fall--so much the worse for any one who is underneath! Those ashore grabbed the stuff as well as they could and dragged it into the sheds--petrol, shoes, blankets, sacks of corn--over it went! We didn’t kill anyone, though Lord knows why not, nor did the Austrian aviators who came at two o’clock in the morning and dropped four or five bombs which burst all around--excepting one which fell into our corn without going off and which Fourgues threw overboard as though it were a cigarette end. As soon as they heard the airplanes, all the natives ran like hares, and there was no getting them to come back. A nice lot, want food, but won’t work for it! The destroyer sent us some men, and although they must have longed for sleep after the dog’s life of these last few days, they dragged the things out as though they were doing it for themselves. They were certainly doing someone else’s dirty work! By five in the morning the hold was empty and scraped clean and the _Pamir_ left without waiting for anything more. The destroyer, having received a wireless during the night, stayed behind, so she put out to patrol around the neighbourhood, and we went down the Adriatic without being convoyed. If a hydroplane with a rifle had fired on us we should have been prisoners, and wouldn’t that have looked pretty! Fourgues was cursing below his breath, saying that a ship of three thousand tons is worth taking and that France is not rich enough to cast them loose in enemy waters like that. And we had no orders, and Fourgues was wondering whether to return to Cardiff or go to Toulon, or what. In short, life on the bridge was far from amusing. As a climax, a crank started heating. We had to slow down to three knots and turn the hose on it. There was time for us to be sunk ten times over, for it took fifty hours to get back, with dirty weather and head winds. Fourgues wanted to go in between Corfu and the coast to find still water and to anchor if the crank wouldn’t cool off; but just as we were turning into the north channel, a whole flotilla of torpedo-boats came along and signalled for us to keep outside. They shouted through the megaphone that French boats should not go into Greek waters. But the _Pamir_ is not a war-vessel.... They talked on. It seems that the whole Navy believed the _Pamir_ had been sunk or torpedoed and that they had been searching for us everywhere for twenty-four hours. The destroyer which was with us at Antivari had received orders to come back and try to find us, while the others went up. Our convoying T.B.D. started out at full speed and passed us without seeing us, of course, because we were hugging the coast for shelter, and was cursed like the deuce, by wireless, by the Commander-in-Chief, but Fourgues was annoyed, a little, to learn of it.