An eternity seemed to pass before he came up--an eternity during which he rolled over and over in a seething green wilderness. When, choked and coughing, he gained the surface he felt that it had been changed into another world. The former peace of waters scarcely disturbed by gentle waves whereon heads had bobbed in apparent merriment, the listed ship that had lain sleeping on the skyline, were gone; in their stead was a great waste of hissing bubbles which burst about his face and blinded him. The surface had become an ocean of hisses--as though the submarine, agent of that nation which generates hate, had by some wicked magic changed the water with its hatred, too! And in the midst of this confusion a chorus of three hundred passionate voices wailed their anguish to a passive God; for, while these human beings had been whole before, there were now many whom the sweeping wreckage had torn--some with fractured bones, some disembowled, some mercifully dead! Never could Jeb have dreamed a transition so horrible! Already scores of panic-stricken were climbing on an overturned boat, drifting off to the right. Another upturned boat floated at a greater distance, and Jeb saw the bobbing heads appear again, beginning to move as a flock of swimming ducks toward it. But many heads did not move at all, and he knew what their inertia meant. One of this kind floated close to him, and made him sick. He pushed it away, but it kept drifting back, seeming unwilling to leave him, till in desperation he untied the life belt tapes and let it sink. An hour earlier, had Jeb been told he could do this, he would have screamed denials. Presently a voice hailed him cheerily, and he beheld Tim, still holding the little nurse, balanced on a kind of box affair that floated almost flush with the water. "Come over, Jeb," the sergeant called. "Shure, an' there's room for wan more, an' 'tis cold ye'll be, I'm thinkin' afore we turn in tonight!" "He oughtn't to joke like that," Jeb thought, beginning now to shiver; for he had become tired, and swam the intervening distance painfully. "Easy, lad," Tim leaned to give him a hand, "for if ye don't look smart 'tis off we go agin, an' 'twon't do the lass no good bein' colder'n she is! Did I hurt ye now, me darlin'?" he asked a moment later of the little nurse, who smiled back at him. Blood and water were trickling down her ashen face from a scalp wound; yet she was many times more fortunate than scores of other poor creatures near to them. There is an unparalleled ruthlessness in a sweeping wave of heavy debris, beneath which a human body can be ground to atoms.