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When I visited Turkey after the Balkan war our steamer somehow “missed” the mouth of the bay, and no one remembered the exact position of the mines! As a matter of fact, the Senegal was blown to atoms only a few days ahead, and our own escape was pure luck. There was considerable alarm on board, and I was once more filled with gratitude for my own small share of the fatalism of the Turk!

On this occasion, for my own private benefit, I could also have wished that our captain had been a “smaller” man, or one less scrupulously compact of duty. When I admitted that I had really come on board in search of a British flag, no matter how torn and tattered, he only looked at me as though I were mad.

“You don’t seem to know much about the inner workings of the navy,” was all he said.

“One does not bother about the ‘inner workings’ of anything one loves,” I answered.

So with the gravest courtesy he explained to me that a new flag could not possibly be obtained until the “tattered” one had been handed over to H.Q. Nevertheless I believe that a French, Italian, or even an American, captain would have contrived some means of acceding to my request.