You know I’ve no excess of admiration for the Boches, and if there were no other reason I should have a grudge against them for the dog’s life they have made us lead for a year and a half, and because of them I don’t see when I can go home. But you know, there are things they do better than we and which we should learn from them if we don’t want to lose months and years. How does it help us to refuse to imitate them in such matters? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. We shan’t become savages because we forestall them in their tricks. Much good it will do us to wait till we’re compelled to imitate them. In the Naval History you lent me I read recently that the Coalition only beat Napoleon when by dint of being beaten, they learnt to copy him. And it took them fifteen or twenty years, and if they had caught on sooner it wouldn’t have taken so long. Why is it that in France we still run the limited and express trains which I saw arriving in Havre and Marseilles? The Norwegians and Swedes told us that for a long time the Germans have been running all their trains at the same speed, the passengers in between the goods. In that way traffic is not delayed, whereas in France, with the idea of making people behind the lines believe that the war is being won as easily as a game of cards, they put on a lot of fast trains which are only of use to the shirkers and which hold up the shells and war-material at all the stations. So how can you expect things to happen? I pondered all this when the _Pamir_ was ordered to anchor at Estaque, near Marseilles, for five or six days, as there wasn’t a single foot of unencumbered dock in the port of Marseilles and all because of the congestion on the railways. One day twenty-four of us were rolling and pitching in the mistral; another day there were thirty-two, empty and loaded, each earning a thousand or two thousand francs a day doing nothing. I tell you, if a Boche submarine came into this road, which is open and without protection, about one or two in the morning, she could send a good half-dozen of craft like the _Pamir_ to the bottom and get away before anyone had time to say “Jack Robinson!” But the land-lubbers, civilians or service men, said the idea was really too funny and that submarines wouldn’t dare come near the coast of France, either here or on the Atlantic! After that, all we can do is to pull ourselves together and await the torpedo with arms folded.