In the torpedo boat aboard which I was afterwards taken we were set first of all to act as a target to a shore battery. The guns aimed at us but their direction was deflected so that the shells fell six hundred metres to the right of us. Except for this their first shell would have sent us to the bottom.
Nineteen shots were fired and of these five were direct hits and two others fell so close that we should have been badly damaged. If it had been real warfare not many of that crew would ever have seen their homes again.
About four in the afternoon we put on steam to join a flotilla which was already on the way cutie sea. They were waiting for us twenty miles away. We were to find and attack a cruiser which had been ordered to go from a certain point on the mainland to a certain island, a distance of a hundred and twenty miles.
When night had fallen a heavy sea was running and with all our speed on we were rolling a good deal I was glad, standing on the bridge, to have a rail to cling to. "This is nothing," the commander told me, "sometimes she rolls so that when you're hanging on to that rail your feet are swept away from under you." that good printing is an asset of great value. The
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.