The fog--the interminable fog which never lifted for more than a few hours at a time during the whole of our three weeks in German waters--banked thick above the green stream of the swift-running tide as our picket boat shoved off from the _Hercules_ at eight o'clock that morning, and there was just sufficient visibility to pick up the successive buoys marking the course to the entrance to the basin. Running in just ahead of an antique torpedo-boat with the usual indolent sailors slouching along its narrow decks, we stepped out upon the longest pontoon landing I have ever seen. Twenty yards wide, and over a hundred in length, it was constructed so as to rise and fall with flow and ebb of what must have been a very considerable tide.
No one being on the landing to receive the party, we started walking in toward its shoreward end. The men on the torpedo-boats stared at us with insolent curiosity, without the suggestion of the shuffle of a foot toward standing at attention as even the "brassiest" of our several "brass-hats" passed by; but from the galley of a tug moored on the opposite side the cook grinned wide-mouthed welcome. She was a fine, upstanding, double-braided blonde of generous proportions, and the bulging bulk of her overflowed the narrow companion-way into which she was wedged as the raw red flesh of her arm swelled over the line of its rolled-up sleeve.
"No traces of under-feeding in that figure," said a British flying officer, with the critically impersonal glance he would have given to the wings of a machine he was about to take the air in. "No," acquiesced one of the Americans; "and there's no fear of _schrecklichkeit_ in that face, either. Pipe that 'welcome-to-our-fair-city' grin, won't you. Could you beat it for a display of ivories?"
A bustling young flying lieutenant came hurrying to meet us at the shore end of the landing, apologizing for his tardiness by saying that it was due to "trouble about the cars." After seeing the motley collection of motors which awaited us outside the gate, one had no difficulty in believing him; indeed, it was hard to see how there could be anything but "trouble about the cars." The best of them was an ancient Mercedes, the pneumatic tyres of which, worn down to the treads, looked as though they would puncture on the smooth face of a paving stone. Two others--one of them looked like a sort of "perpetuation" of a collision between a Daimler lorry and a Benz runabout, and the other was an out-and-out mongrel with no visible marks of ancestry--had the remains of what had once been solid tyres of _ersatz_ rubber bound to the rims with bits of tarred rope. The fourth and last was _ersatz_ throughout. That is to say, it seemed to be made--from its paper upholstery to its steel-spring tyres--of "other things" than those from which the normal cars one has always known are made of.