Fourgues and I remembered all this when we left and we discussed it till we got to Archangel. The _Pamir_ picked up the convoy at sea ten miles from Trondhjem and we went around Norway together. There were two English cruisers and four destroyers to escort fourteen merchant vessels. It was a fine convoy and all those ships together looked like a naval squadron, but the people who decide the formation of convoys would do well not to group boats going fifteen knots with those which can make seven or eight only by going full speed ahead. After two days’ sailing, the _Pamir_, which was about in the middle, began to lose sight of those farthest in advance, as well as of those farthest behind. The convoying ships kept tearing up and down to keep us together. We did get together somehow or other, but after the North Cape there was a little spell of choppy seas and rolling and pitching and as much visibility as in a tunnel. It lasted twenty hours, and when the weather cleared there were only six of us out of the fourteen. The fast ones had run ahead; the cripples had simply disappeared. Naturally none of the absent had wireless and the warships spent three days hunting for them. There was one with a damaged rudder that had jammed itself on the jagged reefs they have up there and split in two. The people were fished out, but there’s no fear of the cargo getting to the Russian front. Finally our convoy dribbled in to Archangel in bunches of three or four. It is the best time up here. After a month and a half or two months, everything will be frozen out, literally and figuratively. But it’s not with fourteen cargoes nor fifty nor a hundred that one could give the Russians what they need! The fleet of the whole world would not be enough, but it is well to give them all we can. It will serve them right--and us too--for letting the Germans get in everywhere! It seems that at the declaration of war three-fourths of their factories were stopped because it was the Germans who ran them. Mechanics can’t be taught in forty-eight hours, as I know after my experience with the shaft of the _Pamir_; and if you add that the Boches simply appropriated all their factories in Poland, you can see why the _Pamir_ and her consorts must fly to Archangel with war-material. They loaded us at Brest without even giving me forty-eight hours to go to La Rochelle, under pretext that the Russians were waiting for us as for the Messiah. But, Lor’ love you, here there’s no hurry. They have already taken twenty days to unload a part of the fourteen ships and are not nearly through. At the time of writing, the _Pamir_ has had only her forward hold emptied--the aft hold can wait! They sent us away from the docks because of another convoy which had arrived in the meantime and which they began to unload. When all these boats are half emptied they are sure they can’t get away and they let them rot in a corner of the docks.