By telling the story of Captain Frank M. Custance, of the Royal Navy
Reserve, as typical of the stories of a coterie of merchant ship men in
the service, Mr. Ralph E. Cropley most interestingly reminds the public
that the war was not altogether won by the men in the trenches. The
merchant ship commanders played some small part in the winning. Indeed,
Mr. Cropley goes somewhat further. He concludes his story of Captain
Custance, which appeared in the New York _Evening Post_, with this
paragraph:
“Without their valor this war would have been over long ago and Germany
would have won. I say this without reserve, for it is the truth. It has
only been by their untiring sacrifices that the soldiers have gotten to
the trenches at all and been kept supplied with munitions and food. The
merchant ship men have done work which gold cannot pay for and never
have thought of themselves—simply of the great cause which to them has
meant the end of cruelty.”
Though Captain Custance is an English seaman he is familiarly known to
Americans who have sailed between New York and Bermuda in the winter or
to the Land of the Midnight Sun in summer, for he was Captain of the
tourist boat _Arcadian_ that made those trips in the different seasons.
He was up among the Norwegian fords when England entered the war,
and it was a question whether he could save his ship by evading the
Germans. Not that he personally had any question about it. He proceeded
to act with the calm assurance characteristic of his conduct in normal
sailings, quietly determined to get safely away. So, excellent seaman
that he was, “in the darkness of that famous Monday night of Aug. 4,
1914, without a pilot, he took her through the dangerous ford to sea.
’Twas indeed a feat.”
But there were dangers at sea, too, for it was necessary to avoid
any ship or craft that heaved in sight, and constant vigilance, with
much dodging, was necessary before he got into Liverpool with his
American passengers saved from anything so unpleasant and perilous as
drifting in open boats on the high seas. With equal success he landed
them in New York some days later, their number having been added to by
Americans stranded in England.