Well, as for myself--to get excited wouldn't help. I went to my cabin
as calmly as I could, determined to save what I could of my valuables.
I put them in my lifebelt. I took a receipt for 20,000 lire, which
I had left with the purser. I went toward the bow of the ship. I
descended the staircase to the second cabin, on the way to the purser's
office. A large part of the staircase had been shot away--and the
horror of what I saw at the bottom of it made me instantly forget what
I was going for. There lay three or four women, four or five children,
and several men. Some of them were already dead, all, at least, badly
wounded. I made sure two of the children were dead. The purser sprawled
limply across his desk, inert, like a sack of meal that has been flung
down and stays where it lies. He had been shot in the head. The blood
was running bright like red paint, freshly spilt, down his back, and
his hair was matted with it.
The first series of shots had wrecked this part of the ship, breaking
through and carrying away whole sections of the framework. I tried
to get back up the stairs. But in the slight interval of time I had
consumed, enough additional shells had been discharged to finish the
wreck of the staircase.
I saw that this was not what the nations call, ironically enough,
"legitimate warfare," but wholesale and indiscriminate massacre.
Seeing my exit that way cut off, I started through the second cabin
to go up the central stairway. The sight that I ran into there was
indescribable. All the passengers from the third cabin had rushed up
into the second. They had altogether lost their wits. The only thing
that was left them was the animal instinct for self-preservation in its
most disastrous and most idiotic form. Men, women, and children were
burrowing headforemost under chairs and benches and tables. I saw one
man, his face pressed close against the floor sidewise, heaving a chair
up in the air with his back, in an effort to efface himself.
All the while the detonations, like continuous thunder and lightning,
increased the panic. Women were on their knees in mental agony, each
supplicating the particular saint of the part of the country from
which she came to save her from death. I pushed and shoved them by the
shoulders. I took them by the legs and arms and clothes, and urged
them, in Italian, to get up, to put on lifebelts, to get off the ship.
I told them that, at least, they would find no security from shells
under chairs and tables.
I found a poor old woman at the foot of the stairs, huddled in prayer.
Her thin, gray hair straggled loose over her shoulder. I recognized her
as a woman I had got acquainted with in my search for a fellow-citizen
to join me in the first cabin. She was 65 years old, she had told me.
She had seen two sons off to the war, and was now going to a third who
had emigrated to America and lived in Pennsylvania. It was the first
time she had ever crossed the ocean. She was sick of the thought of
war. In the New World she would find peace and comfort for her old age,
with her "Bambino," as she still called the grown-up man who was her
son. So when I saw her lying there I was possessed of but one idea--to
get her off alive. I told her to come with me, that I would protect
her. She acquiesced, but her fright was so great that she hung limp as
if she had no spine while I half dragged her to the first cabin deck.
A boat was being lowered. It had been swung out on the davits. It
already seethed full of people. And more men and women and children
were fighting, in a promiscuous, shrieking mass, to get into it as it
swung out and down. The men, with their superior strength, were, of
course, getting the best of the struggle. Age or sex had no weight. It
was brute strength that prevailed.
At the sight before her the old woman grew frantic with unexpected
strength. She suddenly jerked loose from me, and before I could prevent
her, ran with all the agility of fear and jumped overboard. Others
flung their bodies pell-mell on the heads of those already in it. Some,
in their frenzy, missed the mark at which they aimed themselves and
fell into the sea. To make the horror complete, the boat now stuck at
one end, tilted downward, and spilled all its occupants into the sea,
ninety or a hundred at once. They seized each other. Some swam. Others
floundered and sank almost immediately, dragging each other down. Some
drowned themselves even with lifebelts on, not knowing how to hold
their heads out of the water.
I tried to speak with the passengers still on deck. It was useless.
Everybody was talking in his own particular dialect. Then I realized
the predicament I myself was in--an utter foreigner, whom they would
sacrifice in an instant for one of their own nationality. Perhaps if
only I had some of my jewelry I might be able to bribe my way to safety
in some such crisis.