And in the meantime, old man, I am still a long way from La Rochelle, and I’m worried. It does no good for you to tell me that all is going well, that everything is moving, that it will soon be over--all that doesn’t help with my affairs. There you are on the _Auvergne_, well tied up snug in a harbour, and I think you are quite right to be there, for there is no use needlessly exposing battleships which cost eighty millions of francs and carry twelve hundred men. Not that your battleships are much good either--and I’ll tell you later what Fourgues thinks about that. At present there are only two things that count, according to my way of thinking--the Boche submarines and the merchant vessels which provision the Allies. All the rest is all my eye. Only, the Allied Admirals are neither on the German submarines nor on the merchant vessels. So they play to their heart’s content with code-telegrams while the ships that go sailing by are being torpedoed. But Fourgues’ cards say that the _Pamir_ won’t be torpedoed this year. As the war ought to be over before 1917, the rest doesn’t matter. Good-bye, old man. Send me your photograph in sub-lieutenant’s uniform and don’t look haughty when it’s taken. We are putting at least as much into this on the _Pamir_ as on the _Auvergne_, where I send you a hearty handshake. BILBAO, _April 27, 1916_. DEAR OLD MAN, We are here to get iron. You know it’s good in this country, and we haven’t any left in France. But I will start again at Salonica where I left off. They had no idea what to do with the _Pamir_ down there. We should be there yet if Fourgues had not annoyed all the big bugs of the Navy so that they told him at last to get out and go to Malta, on chance, where there might be something for us to do. We left in ballast, nothing in the hold and a few passengers, young fellows from nineteen to twenty-five years of age who were leaving Salonica to finish their higher education in Spain, Switzerland, or Holland. All these young people were very pro-French and Venizelist, and Fourgues was astonished at their going away from Salonica to study elsewhere than in France, especially as they said with tremendous gestures that the hour of Venizelos was about to strike and that he would at last espouse the cause of the great and generous nation which--who--of whom--and so on and so forth--and that they should form an army in Greece to fight at our side and that Greece would come into her own again. Fourgues chatted with them in order to pump them and after a while he understood.