The symbols of Honour and Glory and Time that looked so handsome in the
flooding sunlight of the _Titanic's_ stairway lie crushed into
unrecognizable shapes and splinters beneath the tonnage of two thousand
fathoms of ocean water. Time is no more for the fifteen hundred souls
who perished with them; but Honour and Glory, by strange ways and
unlooked-for events, have come into their own. It was not Time, nor the
creatures and things of Time, that received their final crown there; but
things that have nothing to do with Time, qualities that, in their power
of rising beyond all human limitations, we must needs call divine.
The _Titanic_ was in more senses than one a fool's paradise. There is
nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy, and far as he may
advance in might and knowledge and cunning, her blind strength will
always be more than his match. But men easily forget this; they wish to
forget it; and the beautiful and comfortable and agreeable equipment of
this ship helped them to forget it. You may cover the walls of a ship
with rare woods and upholster them with tapestries and brocades, but it
is the bare steel walls behind them on which you depend to keep out the
water; it is the strength of those walls, relatively to the strength of
such natural forces as may be arrayed against them, on which the safety
of the ship depends. If they are weaker than something which assails
them, the water must come in and the ship must sink. It was assumed too
readily that, in the case of the _Titanic_, these things could not
happen; it was assumed too readily that if in the extreme event they did
happen, the manifold appliances for saving life would be amply
sufficient for the security of the passengers. Thus they lived in a
serene confidence such as no ship's company ever enjoyed before, or will
enjoy again for a long time to come. And there were gathered about them
almost all those accessories of material life which are necessary to the
paradise of fools, and are extremely agreeable to wiser men.
It was this perfect serenity of their condition which made so poignant
the tragedy of their sudden meeting with death--that pale angel whom
every man knows that he must some day encounter, but whom most of us
hope to find at the end of some road a very long way off waiting for us
with comforting and soothing hands. We do not expect to meet him
suddenly turning the corner of the street, or in an environment of
refined and elegant conviviality, or in the midst of our noonday
activities, or at midnight on the high seas when we are dreaming on
feather pillows. But it was thus that those on the _Titanic_ encountered
him, waiting there in the ice and the starlight, arresting the ship's
progress with his out-stretched arm, and standing by, waiting, while the
sense of his cold presence gradually sank like a frost into their
hearts.
To say that all the men who died on the _Titanic_ were heroes would be
as absurd as to say that all who were saved were cowards. There were
heroes among both groups and cowards among both groups, as there must be
among any large number of men. It is the collective behaviour and the
general attitude towards disaster that is important at such a time; and
in this respect there is ample evidence that death scored no advantage
in the encounter, and that, though he took a spoil of bodies that had
been destined for him since the moment of their birth, he left the
hearts unconquered. In that last half-hour before the end, when every
one on the ship was under sentence of death, modern civilization went
through a severe test. By their bearing in that moment those fated men
and women had to determine whether, through the long years of peace and
increase of material comfort and withdrawal from contact with the cruder
elements of life, their race had deteriorated in courage and morale. It
is only by such great tests that we can determine how we stand in these
matters, and, as they periodically recur, measure our advance or
decline. And the human material there made the test a very severe one;
for there were people on the _Titanic_ who had so entrenched themselves
behind ramparts of wealth and influence as to have wellnigh forgotten
that, equally with the waif and the pauper, they were exposed to the
caprice of destiny; and who might have been forgiven if, in that awful
moment of realization, they had shown the white feather and given
themselves over to panic. But there is ample evidence that these men
stood the test equally as well as those whose occupation and training
made them familiar with the risks of the sea, to which they were
continually exposed, and through which they might reasonably expect to
come to just such an end. There was no theatrical heroism, no striking
of attitudes, or attempt to escape from the dread reality in any form of
spiritual hypnosis; they simply stood about the decks, smoking
cigarettes, talking to one another, and waiting for their hour to
strike. There is nothing so hard, nothing so entirely dignified, as to
be silent and quiet in the face of an approaching horror.
That was one form of heroism, which will make the influence of this
thing deathless long after the memory of it has faded as completely from
the minds of men as sight or sign of it has faded from that area of
ocean where, two miles above the sunken ship, the rolling blue furrows
have smoothed away all trace of the struggles and agonies that
embittered it. But there was another heroism which must be regarded as
the final crown and glory of this catastrophe--not because it is
exceptional, for happily it is not, but because it continued and
confirmed a tradition of English sea life that should be a tingling
inspiration to everyone who has knowledge of it. The men who did the
work of the ship were no composite, highly drilled body like the men in
the navy who, isolated for months at a time and austerely disciplined,
are educated into an _esprit de corps_ and sense of responsibility that
make them willing, in moments of emergency, to sacrifice individual
safety to the honour of the ship and of the Service to which they
belong. These stokers, stewards, and seamen were the ordinary scratch
crew, signed on at Southampton for one round trip to New York and back;
most of them had never seen each other or their officers before; they
had none of the training or the securities afforded by a great national
service; they were simply--especially in the case of the stokers--men so
low in the community that they were able to live no pleasanter life than
that afforded by the stokehold of a ship--an inferno of darkness and
noise and commotion and insufferable heat--men whose experience of the
good things of life was half an hour's breathing of the open sea air
between their spells of labour at the furnaces, or a drunken spree
ashore whence, after being poisoned by cheap drink and robbed by joyless
women of the fruits of their spell of labour, they are obliged to return
to it again to find the means for another debauch. Not the stuff out of
which one would expect an austere heroism to be evolved. Yet such are
the traditions of the sea, such is the power of those traditions and the
spirit of those who interpret them, that some of these men--not all, but
some--remained down in the _Titanic's_ stokeholds long after she had
struck, and long after the water, pouring like a cataract through the
rent in her bottom and rising like a tide round the black holes where
they worked, had warned them that her doom, and probably theirs, was
sealed.
In the engine-room were another group of heroes, men of a far higher
type, with fine intelligences, trained in all the subtleties and craft
of modern ships, men with education and imagination who could see in
their mind's eye all the variations of horror that might await them.
These men also continued at their routine tasks in the engine room,
knowing perfectly well that no power on earth could save them, choosing
to stay there while there was work to be done for the common good, their
best hope being presently to be drowned instead of being boiled or
scalded to death. All through the ship, though in less awful
circumstances, the same spirit was being observed; men who had duties to
do went on doing them because they were the kind of men to whom in such
an hour it came more easily to perform than to shirk their duties. The
three ship's boys spent the whole of that hour carrying provisions from
the store-room to the deck; the post-office employés worked in the
flooded mail-room below to save the mail-bags and carry them up to where
they might be taken off if there should be a chance; the purser and his
men brought up the ship's books and money, against all possibility of
its being any use to do so, but because it was their duty at such a time
to do so; the stewards were busy to the end with their domestic, and the
officers with their executive, duties. In all this we have an example of
spontaneous discipline--for they had never been drilled in doing these
things, they only knew that they had to do them--such as no barrack-room
discipline in the world could match. In such moments all artificial
bonds are useless. It is what men are in themselves that determines
their conduct; and discipline and conduct like this are proofs, not of
the superiority of one race over another, but that in the core of human
nature itself there is an abiding sweetness and soundness that fear
cannot embitter nor death corrupt.
* * * * *
The twin gray horses are still at their work in Belfast Lough, and on
any summer morning you may see their white manes shining like gold as
they escort you in from the sunrise and the open sea to where the smoke
rises and the din resounds.
For the iron forest has branched again, and its dreadful groves are
echoing anew to the clamour of the hammers and the drills. Another ship,
greater and stronger even than the lost one, is rising within the
cathedral scaffoldings; and the men who build her, companions of those
whom the _Titanic_ spilled into the sea, speak among themselves and say,
"this time we shall prevail."
_May 1912._