“I will tell you all about it. I was up on my platform at my watch. My battery of 6-inch guns was down below, all loaded with high explosive shell, weighing 100 lbs. each. All the gunners were ready for anything which might happen, but expecting nothing. So they had stood and waited during a hundred watches. It was greying towards dawn, but there was a good bit of haze and the sea was choppy. The old ship was doing her rocking-horse trick as usual, and also as usual I was feeling a bit squeamish but nothing to worry about. As the light increased I could see about 2,000 yards, more or less—I am not much good yet at judging sea distances; they look so short. The Officer of the Watch was walking up and down on the look-out. ‘Hullo,’ I heard him say, ‘what’s that dark patch yonder three points on the port bow?’ This meant thirty degrees to the left. I looked through my glasses and so did he, and as I could see nothing I switched on the big searchlight. Then there came a call from the Look Out near us, the dark patch changed to thick smoke, and out of the haze into the blaze of my searchlight slid the high forepeak of a destroyer. I thought it was one of our escort, and so did the Officer of the Watch; but as we watched the destroyer swung round, and we could see the whole length of her. I can’t explain how one can instantly distinguish enemy ships from one’s own, and can even class them and name them at sight. One knows them by the lines and silhouette just as one knows a Ford car from a Rolls-Royce. The destroyer was an enemy, plain even to me. She had blundered into us by mistake and was now trying hard to get away. I don’t know what the Officer of the Watch did—I never gave him a thought—my mind simply froze on to that beautiful battery of 6-inch guns down below and on to that enemy destroyer trying to escape. Those two things, the battery and the enemy, filled my whole world.