The _Waldeck-Rousseau_ has had her own risks. Several times she has been attacked by submarines, but doubtless her very familiarity with this danger has kept her from being struck. Her crew are happy over her having escaped the fate of the _Jean Bart_. But what has the future in store? Let us continue to do our duty; let us watch with even greater vigilance, and keep our good ship from the hospital or the grave. Since this accident to the _Jean Bart_ we scarcely venture on the Adriatic except for very definite purposes. The enemy submarines have demonstrated their presence, which could be denied so long as none of our ships, through good fortune or skill, had been actually hit. It is a habit of men’s minds to depreciate the danger which does not touch them. After the admiral’s ship had been struck, the zone of operations was moved to the south, in the Ionian Sea. The “beats” of the cruisers are longer, and the weather is frightful. This sea is a regular gathering-place for the winds. Coming from the four quarters of the horizon, the sons of Æolus meet here and riot. The end of the Adriatic and Albania breed a keen icy capricious north wind which descends at a great velocity, rushing out of the corridor formed by the banks, expanding suddenly in the open, and turning the waves upside down. By way of Epirus and Morea, the winds of the east and southeast come from Syria and Asia Minor, and raise the stormiest seas. Endless fogs are carried over by the fringes of the simoon, from the hot south and the sands of the Soudan and Libya. And the strong west wind, born in the Atlantic, blown over Gibraltar and Sicily, rushes up and throws gigantic waves against the wall of the Ionian Islands, thrusts them back, cuts them and joins them again in wild and formless masses on which we leap and roll as if intoxicated. We see nothing but the gray elements of rain and wind, mist and spray. The ships avoid these latitudes, where few of the commercial routes cross, and which our presence renders still more undesirable. It is a sort of desert place in the city of the sea. Sea birds accompany us no longer; they fly in the heart of the gales. A troubled void, a journey of the Wandering Jew, that is the present existence of the cruisers.