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would be a chance of rectifying it. It was a moment like those grim seconds before entering an examination room or going onto the field before an important game. Crowe looked at their tense faces; it was an object lesson to him in human nature that these gallant young men, about to plunge into an enterprise of the utmost physical danger, were so much worried at the thought of making fools of themselves that the thought of sudden death did not occur to them at all. It made him smile momentarily, but he checked himself sternly. At too many gloomy wardroom breakfasts could he remember the hostility aroused by the smiling optimist who comes in beaming.
    The light was steadily increasing, and the sea had been moderating all through the night. It was no longer necessary to hold on with both hands to preserve one’s foothold on the bridge; there was a hand to spare to hold the glasses to one’s eyes in a desperate attempt to catch the earliest possible sight of the still invisible land ahead.
    Sub-lieutenant Lord Edward Mortimer, RNVR, was nervous as well. He knew this bit of coast intimately, and he was standing by, ready for his local knowledge to be called into service. He knew it in peacetime; he had anchored his yacht often in Crotona itself, and many had been the brief cruises he had made from there; he had a store of memories of sun-baked beaches and sunburned bodies stretched on golden sands, of beautiful women in lovely clothes, of exquisite ruins on the grey-green hilltops overlooking the blue sea.
    ‘Is that land?’ demanded Holby sharply; perhaps seasickness had, as it often does, sharpened his senses.
    They all peered through the greyness; little by little what Holby had first seen took form and solidity.
    ‘That’s not Crotona,’ said Rowles, and there was heartbreak in his voice.
    ‘Do you recognize it, Mortimer?’ demanded Crowe.
    ‘It’s not Crotona,’ agreed Lord Edward, ‘It’s--’ Lord Edward ranged back through his memories. It was that Viennese girl - he couldn’t remember her name now - away back in those impossibly peaceful years. They had gone picnicking with a couple of mules. A cold chicken and a bottle of wine, and some of that sheep’s-milk cheese. He could remember the smell of the macchia in the sunshine.
    ‘We’re seven miles north,’ said Lord Edward, ’eight, perhaps.’
    It had been pleasant riding back on that shambling old mule over those eight miles.
    ‘You’re sure of that?’ said Crowe.
    ‘Yes,’ said Lord Edward. He was sure, although he could not remember the girl’s name.
    Crowe’s staff looked at one another and at Crowe.
    ‘They’ll have sighted us already,’ said Holby.
    ‘No chance of surprise,’ supplemented Rowles, turning the iron in his own wound.
    Crowe said nothing, for his mind was too active for speech.
    ‘We can adopt the other plan,’ said Nickleby, ‘the one we first thought of and discarded. Stay outside the minefield and fire across the neck of the peninsula.’
    ‘Probably that’s the best thing we can do,’ agreed Rowles.
    ‘Mortimer’s right,’ interrupted Holby. ‘There’s the Greek amphitheatre on that hillside.’
    Lord Edward remembered that amphitheatre; he had last seen it by moonlight, and he had not been alone.
    ‘Signal “follow me”,’ said Crowe to the chief yeoman of signals, and then to Hammett, ‘Four points to port, please.’
    The Twentieth Flotilla wheeled southward like a flight of gulls.
    ‘We’ve still got a chance of doing damage,’ said Nickleby. ‘We can signal the other captains to lay on the targets already assigned to them from the new positions. They’ll have the sense to know what we’re after, and firing over the peninsula might be fairly effective.’
    The staff was ready to extemporize, and to make the best of a bad job, and not to admit failure.
    ‘If we strike at once we can still take advantage of surprise,’ said Holby. Running in his mind was a whole series of quotations from