Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE SECOND IN COMMAND "For the wild North Sea, the bleak North Sea Threshes and seethes so endlessly." There followed days of waiting for Van and Ralph Storm, but they were far from eventless. For one of them the Germans chose for a cruel air raid on London, and the boys will never forget the horror of those hours during which a public school was bombed and helpless children killed and maimed. And on another day, as if in stern answer, came the arrival of the first American troops, their parade through London and their review by the King. Morgan joined the others, and the three friends were fortunately recognized by an officer who gave them a place near the reviewing party in front of Buckingham Palace. It was a glorious day. On their way back to Claridge's Hotel, the three stopped for lunch at a restaurant. There they fell to discussing further their proposed brief trip to sea. Morgan professed to be still discontented withhis lot. Had Van and Storm been left to form, from that young sailor's account alone, their opinion of the service being rendered by the mosquito fleet of American motor-boats and destroyers, they might have been pardoned for believing that the work of these boats was not very hazardous, and of little assistance in the maintenance of " The Freedom of the Seas." To know, however, the real part that those small craft were playing against the nefarious form of submarine warfare that the enemy was waging, one would have had to do more even than merely dip into the log-books of some of the American destroyers engaged on anti-submarine patrols. In one of those log-books, opposite a certain date, one might have read some such entry as this: " Shortly after dawn we engaged and sank by gun-fire an enemy U-boat. We rescued and took on bo...