MONDAY. 5.30 A.M.: in sight of the light of Katakolo. 3 A.M.: anchored at 1m.5 S 89 E from this light. Boats in the roadstead: _Courbet_, _Renan_, _Diderot_, _Danton_, _Condorcet_, _Mirabeau_, _Voltaire_, _Paris_, _France_, _Patrie_, _Democratie_, _Republique_, _Justice_, _Commandant-Bory_, _Chasseur_, _Voltigeur_, _Lansquenet_, _Canada_. 4.45 P.M.: weighed with the _Renan_. 6.30 P.M.: started on a route to south and west of Zante. Night cruise. It was one of those Sundays in the Navy when everything is covered with gloom; weeping clouds, high seas, whirling icy wind. We were sailing steadily over a forsaken part of the sea, when a wireless from the Commander-in-Chief ordered us to the west coast of the Morea, to the bay of Katakolo. The dripping officers looked up the description and maps of this harbor we had never visited. As what we had to call evening fell, we approached the rendezvous. We could see nothing there. The rain came down in torrents, shutting out the view and almost the air and space. Suddenly there appeared the vague outlines of the ships, as if drawn in pencil and brushed over with glue. So short-sighted were we that we went near to them to be sure that these huge shapes were not tricks of the rain. Cowering in the rain, they seemed deserted, and we passed carefully between their motionless lines, as during a thunderstorm a traveler makes for his home through streets that are lined with houses set close together. _15 January._ Our anchor fell, and we heard nothing but the pattering of drops on the metal. As the night deepened our ship and our neighbors seemed to thin out like ink in a wash-basin; but the signals flashed on the mast of the _Courbet_, the Admiral’s ship. Red and white, they had difficulty in crossing the rainy whirlwind, and their sparks made even more sinister this winter twilight. They ordered the squadrons to get under weigh. During the night, which is favorable to surprise attacks, the ships never stay in strange or open roadsteads. All together we weighed anchor, and took our distances and our proper intervals. The night had completely fallen, the storm was increasing in violence, the unlighted ships groped about like blind men seeking their places in a ballet. Immense outlines approached, passed, disappeared, in the evolutions of the night; an error in the distance or route, a mistake in calculating the phantoms which moved all together, might have caused an irreparable disaster. At these movements nothing but their work exists in the minds of the sailors; family, country, war and affection, are abolished; one is simply a part of his vessel, like a gun or a smokestack.