I looked and could see nothing, but nevertheless I put the helm over and steered as the lookout had said, when he began to sing out again: “More wreckage right ahead at three hundred yards!” There was no need to call Fourgues. He leaped from his cabin to the bridge with his field-glasses and made out two lifeboats before you could wink. “That’s all right, my boy! There are two boats, quite full. We’ll get them. I take the watch and you go aft to pick the poor fellows up. Have wine and coffee and blankets heated. They must have been there ever since last night and are probably soaked with a choppy sea like this.” Fourgues handled the ship beautifully, and in five minutes we got the men aboard, although the two lifeboats had drifted five hundred yards apart. He put her to windward of them so well that they were in calm water, and as there were only sailors and not a lubber in the lot, they came up the ladder at once. They were drenched. I sent them to dry in the boiler-room, and after they had drunk their coffee and hot wine they slept the whole day and were as fresh as paint by night. There was only one officer, the engineer Villiers of whom I have already spoken. We put him to bed at once in Muriac’s cabin and were a bit scared about him as he was delirious all the way to Algiers. A shell had burst in the engines of the _Mer-Morte_, smashing a cylinder and killing two men, and he doesn’t yet know how he ever came out of it. However, he got better a couple of days ago, and here is the story he told us: The _Mer-Morte_ left Toulon with a cargo of shells, gun cartridges, explosives, and all that sort of thing for the Army of the East. As usual, no wireless, no guns, nothing--just like ourselves. The Company won’t pay and the Navy thinks it a joke. She took the secret route from Toulon to Salonica, the same as the _Pamir_, only in the opposite direction. They were told that the route was guarded from one end to the other. “That story is all right for civilians!” said Villiers. “It would take at least a thousand boats to guard the route from Toulon to Salonica and there aren’t a hundred on the whole Mediterranean.” I ought to add that the _Mer-Morte_ has been knocking about almost as much as the _Pamir_ since the beginning of the war, particularly in the Mediterranean, and that Villiers thinks about things much the same as Fourgues and I, and says that his skipper, who went down with the ship, poor fellow, thought the same way, too. All the same it’s a joke that the people who do the real work of the sea think alike on the subject of the German submarine and say it isn’t a bluff, while the land-lubbers and the papers and the Ministers all tell us not to worry because it’s going to be over in two weeks. Which two weeks? Villiers thinks it’s a pretty bad joke, having just been through it, and although he is only an engineer and not a navigating officer, he said things which Fourgues considered quite true.