"Seize bagages, monsieur?" he said. "Pour deux personnes seulement? Mon Dieu, seize bagages pour duex personnes, c'est affreux."

"But," I said in my cat's-in-the-garden-of-my-aunt French, "we go to hunt the lion in the Afrique. These bagages of which you speak are not so much baggage as guns and cameras and little teensy-weensy-type pacquetages, including contraband cigarettes to fool the British customs into believing they are household effects."

"Ah, bon, bon" he said. "A bas les Anglais. You say you go to shoot in the Afrique, hein? I myself once was in Afrique during a war and found fine sport there. Life was very sportif. We shot and we shot, and it was very sportif."

"What were you shooting to make for yourself such a great sportiveness?" I asked.

"Les Italiens," he said simply, and flapped my seize bagaes checks on the counter.

I streaked out of the shower room, naked, soaking wet, scooped up a pistol and a helmet, and clambered topside to my gun station on the flying bridge. A ship in the convoy's center had copped it and was drifting back, sinking, smoking, dying. I looked around me. The AA guns were manned and ready. So were the bigger guns on the forecastle head and on the poop. So was I, too, I suppose. I had on a helmet and a pistol and a three-weeks' beard. I screwed the battle phones to my helmet and checked in with fat old Donaldson aft on the five-inch fifty, and with Doughman forward on the three-inch fifty, and around me were Red and Plinsky and the Staley twins from San Francisco, all making technical noises like experienced warriors.

And then I looked at me, naked as a jaybird, goose-pimpled out, wearing only a helmet and a pistol and a battle phone to cover my shame. And I thought that in the last few days I had lost a couple of friends and every day we burnt off the machine guns with a blowtorch to kill the ice and that stuff in my whiskers was solid frost and under my fanny were seven thousand tons of high explosives and that only yesterday I was the meek morning editor of the Washington Daily News. A German submarine surfaced in the middle of the convoy and a half-dozen ships blew him out of the water, making a god-awful noise about it. Depth charges plunked and thrummed and jostled against the bottom of my ancient bucket. It was cold up there with no clothes on.

The damned buffaloes had run the length of the marsh and had turned in formation and charged again, this time straight into our scent. They were standing like a Roman battalion, feet firmly rooted, heads proudly high, and noses sniffing, no more than twenty yards in front of Selby. I came up behind him on the run.