On the appointed day the whole convoy weighed anchor and silently slipped out to sea. To such spectators as observed its movements it seemed to be a rather limping, halting procession. The speed of a convoy was the speed of its slowest ship, and vessels that could easily make twelve or fourteen knots were obliged to throttle down their engines, much to the disgust of their masters, in order to keep formation with a ship that made only eight or ten; though whenever possible vessels of nearly equal speed sailed together. Little in the newly assembled group suggested the majesty of the sea. The ships formed a miscellaneous and ill-assorted company, rusty tramps shamefacedly sailing alongside of spick-and-span liners; miserable little two-or three-thousand ton ships attempting to hold up their heads in the same company with other ships of ten or twelve. The whole mass was sprawled over the sea in most ungainly fashion; twenty or thirty ships, with spaces of nine hundred or a thousand yards stretching between them, took up not far from ten square miles of the ocean surface. Neither at this stage of the voyage did the aggregation give the idea of efficiency. It presented about as desirable a target as the submarine could have desired. But the period taken in crossing the ocean was entirely devoted to education. Under the tutorship of the convoy commander, the men composing the twenty or thirty crews went every day to school. For fifteen or twenty days upon the broad Atlantic they were trained in all the evolutions which were necessary for coping with the submarine. Every possible situation that could arise in the danger zone was anticipated and the officers and the crews were trained to meet it. They perfected themselves in the signal code; they learned the art of making the sudden manoeuvres which were instantaneously necessary when a submarine was sighted; they acquired a mastery in the art of zigzagging; and they became accustomed to sailing at night without lights. The crews were put through all the drills which prepared them to meet such crises as the landing of a torpedo in their engine-room or the sinking of the ship; and they were thoroughly schooled in getting all hands safely into the boats. Possibly an occasional scare on the way over may have introduced the element of reality into these exercises; though no convoys actually met submarines in the open ocean, the likelihood that they might do so was never absent, especially after the Germans began sending out their huge under-water cruisers.