I
DODGING THE SUBMARINE
THE Trans-Atlantic journey in submersible days differs from one in ordinary times mainly, though not entirely, in psychology. Your friends at the port of sailing—if you are unfortunate enough to have any—shake their heads and look at you commiseratingly as if you had double pneumonia or were in the last stages of typhoid, tuberculosis or insanity. They tell you how they advised So-and-so, who came all the way from Denver or Dodge City, that he ought to go back home and not sail; and he did so. Then all the way across the submarine keeps bobbing up from beneath the surface of—conversation and exploding either in shudders or in laughter.
There are, however, some concrete reminders that these are not the placid seas of peace. For example, your first glimpse of the slender liner reveals not the former beautiful contrast between black hull, red funnels and white upper works, but one dead level of lead colored war paint. There is a small gun forward and a larger one aft. Notices are on the bulletin boards instructing you how to comport yourself "in case it becomes necessary to abandon ship"—delicate euphemism! Lifebelts are brazenly obtrusive; and the passenger list is cut up into groups and assigned to various lifeboats. A few days out to sea and there is a drill, in which each one arrays himself in his cork necklace and waterproof coat and scrambles up to the upper deck to assemble with his grotesque mates beside his boat, feeling uncommonly corpulent and sheepish.
There are eight or ten passengers equipped with new fangled rubber suits, filled under the arms and about the body with some substance lighter than cork, with compartments for food, water bottle, alarm whistle and all the conveniences of a solitary journey in the sea, except furnaces and propeller. An obese woman of fifty in one of these looks like a huge bifurcated tadpole, and walks, with her leaden soles, like a thousand of brick. There is merriment at her expense, but she looks desperately determined and superior. She has paid between sixty and one hundred dollars for her marine costume, and all that she hath will she give in exchange for her life. What a pity if she does not get an opportunity to use her bathing suit! There is only one defect about these elaborate contrivances, and that is that the driving spray on the crests of the waves is what drowns one, after all. The rest of us, in envy, perhaps, look upon the chosen ten and mutter the Calvinistic sentiment: "A man who is born to be hanged is not going to be drowned."
Strangely enough the most real source of danger is ignored by all the passengers, however sensible of it are the captain and his crew, and that is the running through the nights without "riding lights." Twenty knots an hour we go plunging forward into the blackness, when any moment we may crash into some other craft, of which there are thousands on the seas. The ocean is not so big a place after all. Fancy driving a motor car along a country road at like speed without headlights! To be sure the cases are not parallel, although fairly so. It is strange that there are not more collisions, but old sailors predict that there will be. I have heard of only one, when two transports in the Mediterranean came together. We pass other ships daily, sometimes several in a day, but at night not a glim is shown either by us or by our neighbors. Our windows and ports are covered with sheetiron screens. The last two or three nights we are forbidden to light cigars or cigarettes on deck. At all times the showing of an electric flashlight is "defendu" One evening I stepped out into the Stygian darkness on the promenade deck and stood gazing or trying to gaze into the blackness, when bump! I thought a submarine had hit me on the chin! "Pardon, Monsieur!" and I could tell by the clatter of the wooden shoes upon the deck that a sailor had unconsciously assaulted me.
Many of the nights some passengers, life preservers on them or beside them, spent the livelong night in their steamer chairs upon the deck. They usually declared that they desired the fresh air—the rooms are so stuffy, don't you know. After all, most sane people refuse to forego pajamas and the delightful early morning salt bath, and cold shower, as in peace times. A few of us realized that we had ahead of us a shorter channel voyage more dangerous than the Atlantic; and the wise ambulance drivers on board knew that at times a single mile at the French front would prove far more hazardous from shells than the whole ten days at sea from submarines. Nevertheless, there was a sigh of relief from the whole two hundred and thirty-seven of us when we had made the harbor mouth and the police and customs officials came aboard. These functionaries never appeared so welcome before.
There was a pair of French private soldiers in the second cabin, one of them young and smooth faced, like an American, the bronze cross of war upon his breast. These men came swinging aboard, in their turquoise-blue uniforms, their kits on their shoulders, crying farewells, shouting Vivas and all but singing La Marseillaise. They had been "blesses" wounded reservists, and were American citizens.
There was a young woman, a trained nurse, one would guess, gay, apparently thoughtless, always promenading. Guess again, and you will miss it again. She is at the head of one of the largest international relief agencies, and is admitted to every front.
There was a professor in the Harvard Medical Faculty. He is engaged in an experiment of incalculable value. He seeks to overcome shock, whatever that is. He nor any other surgeon will define it. He must get to a man within a few minutes after the soldier is hit; so he must sit in the front trenches under shell fire, waiting his opportunities. like all other occupants of these trenches, he declares that the monotony is the deadly thing. His method is extremely simple when he explains it. It is a wonder nobody ever thought of it before; but that is to be said of all great inventions and discoveries.
There was the impresario of the greatest grand opera company in America. There was the French art dealer, who has sold some of the world's greatest treasures to American millionaires. There was the Italian consul general to a great city in Canada, who had been called home to take his place in the war office, who uttered to me this well put maxim: "Egotism in a man is bad; in a nation, it is necessary." There was the French manufacturer of automobiles and airplanes, who had been to America purchasing supplies. He and his pretty little wife were inseparable companions and evidently had been deeply in love with each other these twenty years.
There was a big husky western American surgeon on his way as a pioneer to study hospital administration at the front, against the arrival of American troops. There were several young ambulance men, in their uniforms of the American Red Cross, in France, with the little fore-and-aft fatigue caps worn alike by Tommies and poilus.
To me, however, the most striking figure on board was the young American in the Red Cross uniform, with the Medaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre both upon his breast and the two red scars upon his forehead and the hole in his cheek. Handsome? Of course he is handsome, with patrician face, dear, brown eye, high color and little mustache and the lithe figure of an Indian. Ten months at the front; then one day a shell; given up to die, or worse; his father summoned across the sea by a cable which stated that his son, if he survived at all, must be paralytic, or totally blind, or insane; but home for six months and back now to have certain pieces of steel taken out of forehead and face bones; then, if he survives, into the aviation corps, where the first plane he destroys will bring him, he thinks, the Legion d'Honneur, Let him tell the story in his own words, as he told it so modestly to me:
"It was about eight miles northwest of Verdun, last September. The Bosches knew of our motor lorries bringing supplies into the village and kept their guns trained on a certain corner. When they heard a motor coming they dropped a shell at that corner. They heard our ambulance and dropped one on us. It was a hundred to one shot and we got the hundredth. Kelly was killed. I did not lose consciousness, but was blinded and deafened. One eardrum is gone. See, I can stop this side of my nose and blow out of my ear. I was afraid to shout, as the Germans weren't three hundred yards away. I called Kelly, but he did not reply. Then I set out to crawl. I bumped into barbed wire and struck my shoulder, drew back and bumped again. At last I yelled and they turned a machine gun on me, but I lay flat and yelled some more. Then two Frenchmen from the poste de secours came out and got me. That's all."
They sighted a floating mine one day from the bridge, when we were nearing land. The usual method is to fire upon any strange cask, and, if it is a mine, explode it; but this mine was seen so early in the morning that our gallant French captain refused to disturb his passengers with a shot. When I told this afterwards to an English sergeant, he merely remarked: "Well, I'll be damned!" Our captain, however, sent his pilot-boat back to shoot the mine.
Our return across the Atlantic, from a port in England, was singularly fortunate. An American rear-admiral and his staff were upon our ship, returning from a mission abroad. Five destroyers, therefore, accompanied us the first three hundred and fifty miles; then three dropped back, and two remained with us until we were seven hundred and fifty miles out and quite beyond the danger line.