Towards the east a few minutes later the _Jules Ferry_, a cruiser with four stacks, which has been reconnoitering on the other side of the horizon, signals that a torpedo from an invisible submarine has passed a few meters from its hull. So there were at least two of these invisible enemies, and it was the cruisers that baffled their attempt. The Commander-in-Chief can descend fearlessly the path which we have just swept clear. What does one feel on learning in the space of less than a minute that a cruiser worth fifty millions and carrying a thousand men has been dependent for life on the promptness of an order or the intelligence of a maneuver? I know nothing about it, and all those who have known great responsibility in this war will understand what I mean. A little later on, it seems to me, one feels afraid of the peril that is now past. It presents itself under terrifying colors which in the moment of action one did not see at all. Courage is easy enough; you need only get out of yourself, think of others, and everything becomes simple. Afterwards you are much fatigued. After yesterday’s disillusionment, I doubted my being able to sleep. To-day, after this danger, I am sure to escape insomnia. The phantoms of the past will not knock at the door of my memory, for I have lived through a great moment of my life. I may have saved the _Waldeck-Rousseau_! _Otranto Canal, 11 November._ Outside or near the shore, in a peaceful harbor or in a roadstead whipped by the winds, a naval collier speaks the _Waldeck-Rousseau_. For several hours coal by the hundreds of tons passes from the collier to the ship. After so many days of watching and weariness, and of stoking the fires, this is the rest which our crews taste. We coal in front of Corfu or Paxo, or in some cove of Epirus. Each week our insatiable furnaces demand a thousand tons of coal; each week we burn them up in our futile promenades across the Adriatic sea. From dawn to dusk our sailors fill sacks in the bottom of the collier’s hold; their shovels and picks labor in the bosom of the black stuff; windlasses raise the clumps of sacks, and cast them on the deck. There other gangs take charge, lower the sacks by chutes into the bowels of the _Waldeck_, dragging them by hand through the labyrinth of passageways, and into the gaping jaws of the stores; at the edge of the store-room two men with powerful muscles turn out with one stroke a hundred kilos of coal which fall down into the darkness amid a cloud of blinding dust. Crouched at the bottom of the store-room, other sailors receive this dark avalanche, pouring minute after minute; they direct it, pile it up in empty corners, and, stumbling on the piles, their eyes burned by the tar, their mouths poisoned with soot, prepare the way for the new torrents which are coming.