25 February.
Like feudal barons, who lance in hand ride over their empty manors ruined by war, the cruisers traverse a lifeless waste. During the slow succession of days, they are glad to sight, by chance, the stacks of their companions of the patrol. As she comes to the boundaries of her rectangle, the sister ship seems to give us a nod and a good-day. Suddenly our world is alive again. Our thoughts are directed toward our neighbor, and her’s toward us. Whether it is the Renan, the Quinet, the Gambetta, or an entirely different one, we follow her and accompany her movements; the sailors abandon their work and their reveries for this reality which wavers before them.
“She is approaching!”
“I see her bridge!”
“Look, the forestack is pouring out black smoke. They are stoking up the fires!”
“Ah! She is coming on the left. Her masts are passing one after the other.”
“Are we not a good twenty-two thousand meters away?”
“She is farther away. Do you still see her masts?”
“Yes! No! Yes! No! No more.”
The cruiser vanishes and our world becomes empty again. This lasts a day or a week. Sometimes between two clearings of the weather some darker spot appears in the distance, cloud or mountain, cliff or play of the clearing storm, no one can say. But the mechanics and the stokers, the hidden hosts of the depths, who come on deck between two watches ask curiously in the darkness: