Only, they don’t wear them out. The squadrons rest quietly at anchor and from time to time they go out and look for the Boches, or if the Boches come out, they pounce on them. In this way the engines and crews are not worn to bits like the French fleet. You bet the English officers, who were awfully bored, by the way, invited Fourgues and me over during the coaling and questioned us because we had come from the other end of the war! Honestly, they thought we were kidding them when we told them that the whole lot of you, but especially the cruisers and destroyers, were kept cruising up and down with your tails well up, for forty and fifty days at a time, trying to block up the Adriatic. They asked us if it was also the custom in the French army, when a regiment was not fighting, to have it march back and forth behind the lines for five and six weeks at a time. And then a lot of other questions by which we could see that they couldn’t make head or tail of it. That’s not to say that the Grand Fleet does nothing. The cruisers and destroyers guard the coast of England and patrol as far as Norway. It’s ghastly to see the storms they have to face and the state in which they return. So they are given a rest--sent to port with leave for everybody! And you know it makes no end of difference slogging near your native land, feeling that you are protecting it and that when duty is over, you may go and pass a day or two with your family. They are all as jolly as sandboys, except that they are a bit sick at not having been able to fight the big fight with the Germans. Apart from that, they feel that the English fleet is doing its duty, and they cannot understand why you are kept on the go as we described to them. I’m not saying this to rile you, old man, now that you are in the Navy and, as Fourgues says, infected with its spirit, but the English sailors are rather fresher than yours. And you should see the difference in age! When you go with your coal from one English ship to another and chat with this one and that, you might think you are talking to a pal even when it’s an Admiral. On the French cruisers the commander always has white hair and a white beard; it tires him to climb a ladder, and he is afraid of saying too much. Fourgues claims that the Brass Hats are even worse, but I have never seen them. At any rate, for the destroyers here they give them to quite young men, from twenty-five to thirty years old, while down there all I saw were well over forty with pepper-and-salt hair. It’s like that from the top down, ten or fifteen years’ difference. The keenness is in proportion. I don’t know what I shall be like at forty, but certainly with rheumatism and nice little liver complaint I should find it pretty tough to be set on a destroyer where one is drenched from the first of January until the thirty-first of December, and to command no more than seventy men. Whereas, if I could have that now, my word, shouldn’t I be pleased