Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/273

1917-18] transportation lines the Highland Railway and the Caledonian Canal served as connecting links in our communications. If we wish a complete picture of our operation, we must call to mind first the hundreds of factories in all parts of our country, working day and night, making the numerous parts of these instruments of destruction and their attendant mechanisms; then hundreds of freight cars carrying them to the assembling plant at Norfolk, Virginia; then another small army of workmen at this point mixing their pasty explosive, heating it to a boiling point, and pouring the concoction into the spherical steel cases; then other groups of men moving the partially prepared mines to the docks and loading them on the cargo ships; then these ships quietly putting to sea, and, after a voyage of ten days or two weeks, as quietly slipping into the Scottish towns of Fort William and Kyle; then trains of freight cars and canal boats taking the cargoes across Scotland to Inverness and Invergordon, where the mines were completed and placed in the immense store-houses at the bases and loaded on the mine-layers as the necessity arose. Thus, when the whole organization was once established on a working basis, we had uninterrupted communications and a continuous flow of mines from the American factories to the stormy waters of the North Sea.

The towns in which our officers and men found themselves in late May, 1918, are among the most famous in Scottish history and legend. Almost every foot of land is associated with memories of Macbeth, Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell, and the Pretender. "The national anthem woke me," says Captain Belknap, describing his first morning at his new Scottish base. "I arose and looked out. What a glorious sight! Green slopes in all freshness, radiant with broom and yellow gorse; the rocky shore mirrored in the Firth, which stretched, smooth and cool, wide away to the east and south ; and, in the distance, snow-capped Ben Wyvis. Lying off the entrance to Munlochy Bay, we had a view along the sloping shores into the interior of Black Isle, of noted fertility. Farther out were Avoch, a whitewashed fishing village, and the ancient town of Fortrose, with its ruined twelfth-century cathedral. Across the Firth lay Culloden House, where Bonnie Prince Charlie slept before the battle. Substantial,