After so many weeks of cruising, without contact with the world, we had hoped to enjoy a few days of rest at Malta, a favor which the Commander-in-Chief grants to weary ships. We cherished the illusion that he had had us come so that he might deliver his communications to us and send us quickly on our mission. But in the navy one must never hope unless one wishes to be deceived. Hardly had we arrived at the anchorage of Arkudi when the _Waldeck-Rousseau_ was charged with an urgent mission on the other side of the Balkan peninsula, to Saloniki. Regretfully she takes the southern route, winds around Greece and the Peloponnesus, turns towards the north, and through the mazes of the Ægean Sea seeks the road to Thessaly. Our faces and eyes begin to show their weariness. It is not without betraying the strain that the stokers before their furnaces, the engineers before their pistons, the gunner lookouts before their guns, have lived this interminable length of days and nights, alternating between heavy labor and broken rest. The air between decks becomes heavier and more stifling with each passing day; dust and heat lie over everything, and one is as weary after a heavy sleep as at night on a railroad train with all the windows closed. Everyone wonders whether we shall ever have the pleasure of engaging these Austrians or Turks, who hide in corners out of reach and send only submarines against us. The submarines are there; they are everywhere, they are nowhere. We stretch out our arms in the empty air; we strain our eyes in looking for the hiding enemy; and suddenly into the side of the vessel passes the wound that has no mercy. And it all happens in silence, for the naval warfare of this age is dumb. I should only be tedious if I told in detail all the vain pursuits of our chases in the upper Adriatic, of patrols by night, of the sunrise, the light, the dusk. The days stretch hand in hand in a gray undulating vista across the water, at the end of which vanish the last hours we passed in France.