May 3, 1918 – Full diary entry:

“Near mutiny at mess over poor food.

In danger zone. Three six-inch guns mounted. Most men sleep with clothes on tonight.

Short arm.”

A 6-inch gun is a very, very large gun and at first I was thinking Robert was mistaken. Most of the pictures I’ve seen of guns that could be mounted and removed from a ship’s deck were three or four inches. But here’s a newspaper article (the Sacramento Union) from August 29, 1914 about the Adriatic:

A mounted 6-inch gun from 1936:

From Daniel Phillips’ War in Words:

The mess hall I speak of was rather small. It was crowded with long narrow tables and benches. We did not go in and sit down and then wait for service. Every soldier lined up single file on the open deck with a mess kit in hand and then passed in through one door where a kitchen detail filled each extended mess kit with food; the food generally being some of the following: potatoes, bread, asparagus, boiled dried Australian beef, boiled rabbit, vegetable, tea, and sometimes coffee. Having received a helping of some of the above food, we sat at one of the many narrow tables to eat. After eating, we got up and went out through an opposite door onto the open deck where we always found a large tub of hot soap suds for washing our mess kits, after which we took them down to our bunk where we kept our individual dish towel.

Where was Robert today? See the timeline.