big medal with him in case we had to take to the boats, he replied: "With
twenty-eight persons in the boat! Good Lord, don't you think she'll be
carrying enough freight?"
We steamed along, dark night astern this time and the white morning
above our bow. The bridge--three naval and two ship's officers--had for
some time been using the glasses. From aloft forward came the sudden
yell: "Land ho!"
The bridge nodded that it heard. "Land ho!" repeated the lookout
stentoriously. "Two points off the port bow," and then, peering
doubtfully down at the bridge: "Am I right?"
"You are," said the bridge sweetly; "we've been looking at it for half
an hour." Which was rather rough, for to shore-going eyes land does at
first look like a low cloud on the horizon and, naturally, a fellow
wants to make sure.
Pretty soon we could most of us see it from the deck, and it did look
good. I once saw the flat, bleak Atlantic coast of Patagonia after ten
days at sea, and the high iron wintry coast of Newfoundland after
another period at sea, and I clearly recall that even they both looked
like fine countries. And the coast of France was neither bleak nor icy,
so you may guess that it was a pleasing sight on this summer morning. It
was a dream of a day, the sea like a green-tinted mirror, the sky blue
as paint, and the softest little breath of air floating off the land to
us. We were perhaps ten miles offshore.
The enchanted land lay before us and our troubles behind us--or so we
thought--and yet we were many of us disappointed. After our more than
three thousand miles we had not even caught sight of a U-boat.
Now, we probably did not want to see one, but we sort of had an idea
that we were entitled to have one pop up and then disappear. Something
to talk about, without anybody coming to harm through it--that was about
our composite idea.
However, there are compensations for all things; we could now prepare
peacefully for going ashore. I was in the lounge-room below sharpening a
pencil, and, there being no waste-basket handy, carefully shunting the
shavings into a writing-desk drawer.
The fire-alarm rang. That was the signal to hurry on deck with your
life-belt, take your station by your boat, and prepare to abandon ship.
But we had been doing that every day since we left home. The first time
we heard that call we had gone jumping, but after the third or fourth
time we moved more leisurely.
Some took their life-belts from their rooms and started up. Every
soldier, of course, grabbed one from where they were piled up in the
passageways and went at once. They had no option. Their officers would
get after them if they did not.
I thought I would finish sharpening my pencil. I thought I heard a blast
from a ship's whistle somewhere outside; but I was not sure. Then I
heard a blast from our own ship's whistle. Wugh-wugh-wugh! I did not
wait for any more. I did not finish sharpening the pencil. I did not
wait to shut the desk drawer. I did not do anything but move. There were
six blasts from the whistle, and six blasts meant U-boats.
There was a heavy-set officer coming down the passageway. He was heavier
by twenty pounds than I was, but I had more speed. I know I had. Not
since the winter's day on George's Bank a quartering sea chased me down
the cabin companionway of the _Charles W. Parker_ of Gloucester have I
moved so fast on a ship, and I was fifteen years younger then. We bounced
off each other. We did not stop to talk when we straightened out. He went
his way and I went mine, and if I looked anything like him, then my jaw
was thrust out and my eyes had an earnest look in them.
My life-belt was under my bunk. It did not stay there long. I went back
down the passageway jumping. There was a fine crush going up to the
boat-deck. Only a seagoing man knows how to take a ship's ladder with
speed. You just got to have practice at it. There were some fine
athletic boys among the troopers, but "Sweet mother," wailed a ship's
man, "are those new army shoes made of leather, or are they lead that
they move so slow?" And that comment did not have to travel a lonesome
road.
While scooting up the ladder we heard a gun; and another gun. As we made
the boat-deck there was another ship barking out six short blasts.
The ships of the fleet, when we got to where we could see them, were
headed every which way. We could feel our own ship heel over--she turned
so sharply. Every ship in the fleet was going it--right angles, quarter
angles, all degrees of angles. But what impressed us most--we almost
laughed to see her--was the lubber of the fleet. She was twice the tonnage
of most of us, and early in the run across she had brought anguish to our
souls by the way she lagged. "You bum, you loafer, you old cart-horse, why
don't you move up?" our soldiers used to yell across at her. She had not
then enough men in her steam department to keep her engines warm, so she
reported. But now she had steam enough. She was wide and high, a huge hulk
of a ship, and here she was now charging--charging was the word--like a
motor-boat at where somebody said the U-boat had just submerged. Whether
she got her U-boat, I don't know; but she certainly did cut through the
water for about a mile.
The ship next behind us went after something; and the ship next ahead
went tearing away after something else, and another ship--but, man, a
battalion of eyes could not follow them all. A destroyer went--zizz-sh
zizz--a thirty-odd knot clip--and the next thing we saw was a ten-foot
column of solid white water shooting straight up beside that destroyer.
And then came the terrific Bo-o-om! Our ship shook from one end to the
other. I thought it came from inside of us--that it was a loading-port
door let drop by some careless ship's man below. The ship's officer in
charge of our life-boat thought so, too. He stepped to the ship's side
to look down. "That one, he should be put in the brig--scaring us all
like that!" I agreed with him heartily, only I thought he should be put
in a second brig after he got out of the first one. Some time later we
learned that it was the shock from the bomb dropped by the destroyer,
from which you can gauge what chance the submarine will have which
happens to catch one of those bombs on its back.
We carried two 5-inch guns in our bow and two astern. Those gun crews
had been standing by those guns from the first day out. For the last
three days they had been sleeping near them in their life-jackets and
taking their meals standing beside them. They were not going to be left
out of it. About a thousand yards away some one reported a floating
torpedo. Whether it was a live or a spent one made no matter. It was too
soft a target; besides, some ship in the hurry of manoeuvring might
run into it. Bang! went two of our 5-inch fellows, one from each end of
the ship and both together.
That was when we heard from our chief engineer. He had been below from
the beginning, and knew from the way the bells were coming down from the
bridge that there was something doing topside. When the destroyer
dropped her first bomb he wondered if the ship was torpedoed. He waited,
and his men, with their shovels and slice-bars and oil-cans--they
waited, every one of them, with one sharp eye to the nearest ash-hoist,
which reminded the chief that he would never leave home again--and this
time he meant it--without installing those four more ladders leading up
from the engine and fire-room quarters to the decks. No, sir, he would
not.
But nothing happened! And then those two 5-inch guns went off together.
War-ships are built to withstand impact, but merchant-ships--no. This
time the chief was sure she was torpedoed. His fire-room force were
mostly Spaniards. He used to talk at table about his fire-room gang.
"You would think, with your ship coming through the war zone and your
watch down in the bottom of her, that you would want to go up topside
when your watch was done, for, of course, if any U-boat got the ship, it
would be the fellows below who would first get the full benefit." But
that gang of his! "Doggone, they'd sit there when their watch was over,
six or eight of 'em, and play some cross-eyed Spanish card-game for a
peseta a corner. What d'y' know about them?"
The chief's gang could not talk English, but they had speaking eyes.
They now looked at the chief, and he went up to have a peek. He came
back soon. "They are having target practice," he told them. He had been
running the Caribbean ports long enough to be able to say that much in
Spanish; but more than all he smiled as he said it. You want to smile to
get away with anything like that in the fire-room of a troop-ship in the
U-boat country.
Every ship in the fleet was now having something to say with her guns;
and with their incessant manoeuvring at such close quarters the sea
was all torn up by their wakes. Two or three wakes or bow waves would
cross each other, and the sea would roll up with a bounding white crest.
There were also the wakes of hidden submarines. You could tell them if
you saw any by the way they did not stop in one place; they moved on.
When a gunner saw a submarine wake he fired; where he wasn't sure he
fired anyway. What was he there for? Bang! Boom! Solid shot were
ricochetting, piling up little white splashes, and the shrapnel were
making little holes and bursting into little white smoke puffs all over
the place.
You must not forget that it was a beautiful day and a perfectly calm sea
with the shore of France looming like a blue mirage on the horizon. It
lasted about forty minutes altogether, and through it all the little
destroyers--don't forget them--were weaving in and out among the big
ships; and on the big ships were thousands of troopers, white life-belts
around their olive-drab uniforms, standing steadily by life-boats and
rafts.
Our fellows on the destroyers did handle their little ships well. And
the troop-ships were handled well--no collisions and no gun-shells going
aboard anybody else. A few went across other people's bows and sterns,
but not too near to worry. And in the middle of it all, our guns made so
much noise that before we heard them we saw them--two airplanes,
whirring and cavorting about and above us. Whenever they saw a destroyer
turn and shoot, they would turn and shoot after the destroyer. They
could move about three times as fast as a destroyer, and so quite often
beat the destroyer to it.
Later the airplanes escorted us into port. They were big, powerful
biplanes, and carried a sky-pointing gun mounted forward and the colors
of France painted on their little wings aft. They kept circling about us
until we made our harbor. Whenever they swooped low enough our troopers
gave them a fine cheer.
My job being to tell what I saw and heard, I want to say here that
throughout the entire melee I never saw one periscope! And there were
thousands like me who never saw a periscope. But there were hundreds of
others--cool, sensible people--who are ready to make affidavits that
they did see periscopes.
Why did not more of us see any? Well, a submarine commander needs to
turn up his periscope for only four, five, six, or seven seconds to have
a look. If you do not happen to be gazing directly at the spot, you do
not see it or the white bone which it makes going through the water.
On my ship the ranking officer was a regular army colonel who had seen
active and dangerous service in the Philippines and elsewhere. He is
given rather to understatement than overstatement of facts--a cool,
level-headed observer. He saw a periscope. We had another officer who
had been in the service in the Spanish War, had got out and was now
back. He was probably the best lookout of all the army officers in the
ship--a solid, substantial man with a keen eye. He could see what
anybody else could see, but further than that you had to show him.
Several of us had already christened him "Show me." He reported two
periscopes. Now he had never seen a submarine operating in his life. I
asked him to describe the action of the periscope. He described it
perfectly as I had noticed it in trial trips of submarines off Cape Cod,
which is where the Electric Boat Company used to try theirs out before
turning them over to purchasers.
My own notion of it is that the U-boats have many of us bluffed. They
must be capable men who go in submarines; of good nerve, quick wit, and
the power to withstand long nervous strain. Such men in a submarine are
going to throw great scares into people of less capacity on surface
ships. Put such men somewhere else than in a submarine and they will
outwit men not so well equipped for the war game.
But these men, no men, can make the submarine do impossible things.
Before firing a torpedo the submarine must come near enough to the
surface to stick out her periscope, to have a look around to locate her
target. In sticking out the periscope, lookouts on ships are likely to
see it. On merchant ships they do not keep a lookout which combs the sea
thoroughly; they do not carry men enough for that. The strain of such a
lookout is great. Men cannot stand to it as to an ordinary watch; they
have to be relieved frequently; and so submarines may have an advantage
over merchant ships, especially if the merchant ships are slow-moving
freighters. But a war-ship, or a troop-ship in convoy is something else.
Troop-ships carry an immense number of lookouts, not overworked men who
are liable to go to sleep on watch, but keen-eyed young fellows of high
vitality, surrounded by other young fellows of high vitality, and all
competing to see who can see something first.
They will spot a periscope, under normal conditions, at a pretty good
distance; which does not mean that that periscope is at once going to be
blown out of the water. Hitting a piece of 4-inch pipe at any distance
is not easy; the pipe moving and the ship moving does not make it any
easier.
But the submarine has shown herself. To get her torpedo home she will
have to move nearer. With a thousand eyes looking for her and five, six,
a dozen ships with four guns or more apiece waiting to have a crack at
her, she is not going to have a pleasant time after she moves nearer.
She must show her periscope again to locate her target. To show her
periscope she must get her hull somewhere near the surface; it takes a
little time--not so much, but a little time to get her hull safely below
again; and while she is doing that who can say that not one of our five,
six, or a dozen ships will be handy to the spot? And if one of our ships
should happen to be handy enough, what can save the submarine from being
rammed? And if she is rammed there is no hope for her--she is gone.
I am pretty much of one mind with our first officer in this submarine
matter. In the middle of the combat off the French coast he was making
the rounds, cutting away the lashings which held the life-boats to the
davits--this in case we had to leave the ship. He had a squint at the
banging guns, the charging troop-ships, the flying destroyers; and then
he looked up long enough to say: "A fat chance a U-boat would have if
she so much as stuck her nose out. In four seconds she'd be like a
rabbit among a pack of hunting-dogs. She might get away, but I bet you
no bookmaker would take her end of it."
This argument does not apply to a slow-steaming freighter going it
alone; it is for the matter of troop-ships moving at a fairly good
speed. For myself that time the fleet steamed in direct column ahead,
one ship jam up behind another, in a rough sea and on a black night, at
high speed without lights of any kind, they did a more difficult thing
than to evade or stand off half a dozen U-boat attacks. No fleet of
ships can be put beyond all danger of submarine attack, but the danger
to the subs can be made so great that it won't be worth the price the
attacking force will pay.
I do not know how many U-boats were in that attack. The official figures
will no doubt be given out in time. Our moderate estimators here put it
down as three, with one transport ramming and sinking one U-boat. Two
honest lads of one of our own forward gun crews say that our ship bumped
over another. They felt the bump. Perhaps they did, but bluejackets at
twenty years of age are apt to be optimistic, as witness:
The day after that U-boat fight the skipper, first officer, chief
engineer, and myself were trying our French on a waiter in a cafe
ashore, but not quite putting it over; we had to resort to a little
English to get action for one important item of our meal. A party of
American bluejackets--gun crews--were at another table. They heard us
speak English, whereat one of them called over: "Say, you guys comprong
English? Wee, wee? Then you oughter been where we were yesterday. Yuh'd
seen something. Fighting U-boats we were. Comprong? U-boats--wee, wee,
U-boats. Thirty-six of 'em came after us an' we sunk twelve. Whaddyer
know about that?" We did not know, so we opened up a bottle of the
ordinary red wine of the country, price deux francs, and drank to their
enthusiastic health.
CROSSING THE CHANNEL
To get out of France after getting in, a man has to go to Paris, see the
prefect of police, various consuls, and so on. It was all interesting--the
life in Paris--but it had nothing to do with U-boats. I had to go to
England, and to make England, I had to go to Havre.
And I was in Havre. Looking out the window at a roof across the narrow
street was a sign which read Hotel of the Six Allies. The Six looked as
though it had been painted over. The head waiter told me later that it
had. It had begun at three, then it became four--five--now six. But
there were more than six now--did not the great United States count? Oh,
yes, truly yes--but the paint and painters! They were growing more
scarce. The war--yes. Everything was the war.
The head waiter was a little old fellow with a round back, a quizzical
eye, and the hair of a first violin. After I beat my way by main
strength through three table-d'hote meals with him he let me know that
he could talk English. Why hadn't he told me so before? Oh! Did I not
wish to practise my French? So many did, and if they made him understand,
the tips were sometimes more inspiring.
The steamer for England had been scheduled to leave the night of the day
our train arrived, but she did not leave. We did not learn whether it
was the full moon or the U-boats shifting their hunting-grounds or the
late air-raids on the south coast of England. Whatever the cause, no one
growled much. The steamship people and the government were doing their
best with a difficult service. The delay gave us another day to look the
port over. I had been there years before. Then it was all French; now it
seemed to be mostly British. The streets, the shops, the cafes, were
crowded with English, Canadian, and Australian soldiers. British soldiers
were running the tram-cars. In the country outside was a large British
camp. The French owners of the ships and of the cafes in the narrow
streets near the jetties catered especially to the British soldier and
sailor. English tobacco, English rosbif--they advertised these in quaintly
worded signs.
Ships lay between the jetties and the breakwater, coasting and deep-water
steamers, and the little fishing-cutters with the tanned sails. There was
a fleet (or a flock) of seaplanes all ready to take to either the water or
the air. They took to both while we looked, hurdling the breakwater from
the basin to get more quickly to some smoke on the horizon. They were
brand-new planes all, with the most beautiful polished maple pontoons and
bright varnish over paint that still smelled fresh.
Soldiers not so worn and weary as those on the hospital veranda came
down to the jetty promenade. Priests, nursing sisters, other soldiers
and sailors came also. What interested them most was the sun shining on
the bright new wood of the planes flying out to see what the smoke
meant. It was a ship from across the ocean somewhere, and the planes
circled it into the basin--one more ship which had beat the U-boat game
and brought home something needed. There was some noise along the jetty
and yet more noise in the wide and narrow streets of the town--clanging
trams, whip-cracking fiacres, yelling newsboys, honking taxis, and
soldiers and sailors tramping the pavements. Noise enough, and of the
kind befitting a Channel port in war time; but for a time at least we
heard the noise let down, and the bustle softened.
In a wide street of shops appeared a white-haired priest with a white
crucifix held high before him. Behind him was another priest reading
from a book of prayer. Two laymen came next, bearing a little
white-painted table with a little white coffin--a cheap board
coffin--resting on it. There was a canopy of plain white boards over the
little coffin. There were a few white blossoms on the canopy and beside
the coffin a few lilies of the valley--only a few.
Two other laymen followed the coffin bearers. All the men were
bareheaded. Three women--young women and young mothers to look
at--followed the two men. One of the young women was in deep black. A
group of little girls followed the young woman. Two very old women came
last. No more than that, walking through a crowded street at two o'clock
of a bright day!
It was on us almost before we saw it. Men took off their hats as it
passed; women blessed themselves. Sometimes men's lips murmured a short
prayer; always the women did. The soldiers and sailors, when they were
French, saluted nearly always; the British sometimes. The officers, if
anything, saluted more profoundly than the enlisted men, and, when they
did not stop dead, held a hand to their caps for eight or ten paces in
passing.
Two soldiers were talking with two girls of the streets. One of the
soldiers took off his cap. One of the girls stopped talking to say a
little word of prayer. Both soldiers faced about, and all four gazed in
silence for long after the little cortege had passed on. Then the first
soldier put on his cap, all faced about, and resumed their talk, but
more slowly and not quite so loudly as before.
An English Tommy was driving a tram--a swearing Tommy that you could
hear a block away. He came on the mourners from behind. He was in a
hurry, and by clanging his bell he could have crowded by. But he held
the tram in check, nursing it so as not to frighten the two old women in
the rear--until they came to a wide square. Here there was room. He
clanged his bell, not too loudly, turned on the juice, and hurried to
make up for lost time. Men are being killed by the million over here,
and other men who have been there--these very men on these streets--will
tell you that they hardly turn their heads to see one more killed. But a
little child is different.
Our steamer was to sail next night--at what hour no one could say, but
it was well to be there in good time, we were told, so we went with the
hotel bus. A little porter woman was there with my 70-pound bag before I
even knew "things were ready"; and she said she did not roll it down the
five flights from my room. She carried it every stair step of the way.
Her husband was in the war, and she had five children and it required
more than a few sous in the week for five children, the eldest fourteen.
I agreed that it did.
Swinging on to the jetty, we had to take notice of a shop advertising to
rent life-saving apparatus for the trip across the Channel. It was
fine--a one-piece suit which came from the toes to the ears and a hood
which you could turn in over your head! There was a painting of a
torpedoed passenger ship going up in flames, topside and the hull
settling down into the rolling billows. Men and women were jumping into
the sea and drowning in agony. They had no life-saving, one-piece suits.
But all were not so thoughtless. There were others floating along high
out of water with the most beatific expressions on their faces. They had
been thoughtful enough to buy one of the patent one-piece suits. The
painting was in colors, red and black mostly.