Part 11

The _Snowdon_, escorted by her tiny guard, ran down the coast, entered the Thames estuary, passed the barriers, and finally resigned herself to the charge of a tug. Late in the afternoon, the mass of London began to enclose them, they became conscious of strange, somewhat foul, land smells; the soot in the air irritated their nostrils. The ship was docked close after dusk. The feeling of satisfaction which seizes on the hearts of seamen who have successfully brought a ship into port entered into their bosoms; everybody was happy, happy in the retrospect of achievement, in the prospect of peace, security, good pay, and good times.

Their vessel lay in a basin just off a great bend in the river, in a kind of gigantic concrete swimming pool bordered with steel arc-light poles planted in rows like impossibly perfect trees. To starboard, through another row of arc poles and over a wall of concrete, they could see the dirty majesty of the great brown river and the square silhouetted bulks of the tenements and warehouses on the other side. To port, lay a landing stage some two hundred feet wide, backed by a huge warehouse over whose dingy roof two immense chimneys towered like guardians. The space stank of horse; the river had lost the clean smell of the sea, and breathed a reek of humanity and inland mire. A mean cobbled-stone street led from a corner of the landing space past wretched tenements, fried fish shops, and pawnbrokers' windows exhibiting second rate nautical instruments, concertinas, and fraternal emblems. It was all surprisingly quiet.

Steve, hospitably invited to remain aboard, went to the starboard rail and stood studying the river. The last smoky light had ebbed from the sky; night, rich and strewn with autumnal stars, hung over the gigantic city, and a moon just passing the first quarter hung close by the meridian, and shone reflected in the pool-like basin and the river's moving tide. One of the huge chimneys suddenly assumed a great, creamy-curling plume of smoke which dissolved mysteriously into the exhalations of the city. From down in the crew's quarters came the musical squeals of a concertina, and occasional voices whose words could but rarely be distinguished. The arc lights by the basin edge suddenly flowered into a dismal glow of whitish yellow light strangled by the opaque hoods and under cups affixed by the anti-aircraft regulations. Another concertina sounded further down the street. The moonlight, like a kind of supernal benediction, fell on smokestack and funnel, on shining grey wire and solemn, rusted anchor, on burnished capstan and finger smoutched door. Heat haze, flowing in a swift and glassy river, shone above the smokestack in the moon.

Suddenly, Steve heard down the street a sustained note from something on the order of a penny whistle, and an instant later, a window was flung up, and a figure leaned out. It was too dark to see whether it was a man or a woman. Then the same whistle was blown again several times as if by a conscientious boy, and a factory siren with a sobbing human cry rose over the warehouses. At the same moment, the lights about the dock flickered, clicked, and died. There was a confused noise of steps behind, there were voices--"Hey, listen!" "Wot's that?" the last in pure cockney, and a questioning, doubting Thomas voice said: "A raid?" The figure of the captain was seen on the bridge. One of the ships' boys went hurrying round, doing something or other, probably closing doors. The twins strolled over to Steve, and informed him in the most casual manner that they were in for a raid. It was Steve's first introduction to British unemotionalism, and I imagine that it rather let him down. He says that he himself was "right up on his tiptoes." He also had a notion that bombs would begin to rain from the sky directly after the warning. The twins soon made it clear, however, that the warning was given when the raiders were picked up on the east coast, and that there was generally some twenty minutes or half an hour to wait before "the show" began. Every once in a while, somebody in the group would steal a look at the pale worlds beyond the serried chimney pots and at the moon, guiltless accomplice of the violence and imbecilities of men.

Presently, a number of star shells burst in fountains of coppery bronze. Every hatch covered, every port and window sealed, the _Snowdon_ awaited the coming of the raiders. Whistles continued to be heard, faint and far away. From no word, tone, or gesture of that English crew could one have gathered that they were in the most dangerous quarter of the city. For the one indispensable element of a London raid is the attack on the waterfront, the attack on the ships, the ships of wood, the ships of steel, the hollow ships through which imperial Britain lives.

There is little to be seen in a London raid unless you happen to be close by something struck by a bomb. The affair is almost entirely a strange and terrible movement of sound, a rising, catastrophic tide of sound, a flood of thundering tumult, a slow and sullen ebb.

"There! 'Ear that?" said some one.

Far away, on the edge of the Essex marshes and the moon-lit sea, a number of anti-aircraft guns had picked up the raiders. The air was full of a faint, sullen murmur, continuous as the roar of ocean on a distant beach. Searchlight beams, sweeping swift and mechanical, appeared over London, the pale rays searching the black islands between the dimmed constellations like figures of the blind. They descended, rose, glared, met, melted together. The sullen roaring grew louder and nearer, no longer a blend, but a sustained crescendo of pounding sounds and muffled crashes. A belated star shell broke, and was reflected in the river. A police boat passed swiftly and noiselessly, a solitary red spark floating from her funnel as she sped. The roaring gathered strength, the guns on the coast were still; now, one heard the guns on the inland moors, the guns in the fields beyond quiet little villages, the guns lower down the river--they were following the river--now the guns in the outer suburbs, now the guns in the very London spaces, ring, crash, tinkle, roar, pound! The great city flung her defiance at her enemies. Steve became so absorbed in the tumult that he obeyed the order to take shelter below quite mechanically. A new sound came screaming into their retreat, a horrible kind of whistling zoom, followed by a heavy pound. Steve was told that he had heard a bomb fall. "Somewhere down the river." Nearer, instant by instant, crept the swift, deadly menace. A lonely fragment of an anti-aircraft shell dropped clanging on the steel deck.

"You see," explained one of the twins in the careful passionless tone that he would have used in giving street directions to a stranger, "the Huns are on their way up the river, dropping a kettle on any boat that looks like a good mark, and trying to set the docks afire. The docks always get it. Listen!"

There was a second "zoom," and a third close on its heels.

"Those are probably on the _Ætna_ basins," said the other twin. "Their aim's beastly rotten as a rule. If this light were out, we might be able to see something from a hatchway. Mr. Millen (the first mate) makes an awful fuss if he finds any one on deck." "I know what's what, let's go to the galley, there's a window that can't be shut." ... The three lads stole off. Beneath a lamp turned down to a bluish-yellow flame, the older seaman waited placidly for the end of the raid, and discussed, sailor fashion, a hundred irrelevant subjects. The darkened space grew chokingly thick with tobacco smoke. And the truth of it was that every single sailor in there knew that the last two bombs had fallen on the _Ætna_ basins, and that the _Snowdon_ would be sure to catch it next. By a trick of the gods of chance, the vessel happened to be alone in the basin, and presented a shining mark. The lads reached the galley window.

By crowding in, shoulder to shoulder, they could all see. The pool and its concrete wall were hidden; the window opened directly on the river. Presently came a lull in the tumult, and during it, Steve heard a low, monotonous hum, the song of the raiding planes. More fragments of shrapnel fell upon the deck. The moon had travelled westward, and lay, large and golden, well clear of the town. The winter stars, bright and inexorable, had advanced ... the city was fighting on. Suddenly, the three boys heard the ominous aerial whistle, one of the twins slammed the window to, and an instant later there was a sound within the dark little galley as if somebody had touched off an enormous invisible rocket, ... a frightful "zoom," and impact ... silence. They guessed what had happened. A bomb intended for the _Snowdon_ had fallen in the river. Later somewhere on land was heard a thundering crash which shook the vessel violently. A pan or something of the kind hanging on the galley wall fell with a startling crash. "Get out of there, you boys," called the cook. Ship's galleys are sacred places, and are to be respected even in air raids. And then even more slowly and gradually than it had gathered to a flood, the uproar ebbed. The firing grew spasmodic, ceased within the city limits, lingered as a distant rumble from the outlying fields, and finally died away altogether. The sailors, released by a curt order, came on deck. The top of the concrete wall was splashed and mottled with dark puddles and spatters of water. All agreed that the bomb had fallen "bloody close." The peace of the abyss rules above. Far down the river, there was an unimportant fire.

Said Steve--"I certainly was sore when I didn't have any excitement on the way over in the convoy, but after that night in the _Snowdon_, I decided that being with the Armed Guard let you in for some real stuff. It's a great service."

With which opinion all who know the Guard will agree.

XXXIV

ON HAVING BEEN BOTH A SOLDIER AND A SAILOR

When this cruel war is over, and the mad rounds of parades, banquets and reunions begin, I shall immediately set to work to organize the most exclusive of clubs. A mocking and envious friend suggests that our uniform consist of a white sailor hat, a soldier's tunic, British, French, or American according to the flags under which we served, and a pair of sailor trousers with an extra wide flare. For the club is to be composed of those fortunate souls who like myself have seen "the show" on land and on sea. To my mind, however, instead of mixing the uniforms, it would be better to dress in khaki when we feel military; in blue when our temperament is nautical. Think of belonging to a club whose members can dissect a trench mortar with ease and at the same time say: "Three points off the port bow" without turning a hair. I should admit marines only after a special consideration of each case. Not that I don't admire the marines. I do. I yield to no one in my admiration of our gallant "devil dogs." But the applicant for admission to our club must have first served as a bona fide soldier and then as a bona fide sailor or vice versa. Not that I am a sailor or ever was a sailor in Uncle Sam's Navy. All that I can claim to have been is a correspondent attached to the Navy "over there." But four months' service, most of it spent at sea on the destroyers, subs, and battleships entitles me, I think, to membership, consequently, being president, I have admitted myself.

"Well, you've seen the war both on land and on sea; which service do you prefer ... the army or the Navy?" This question is hurled at me everywhere I go. I answer it with deliberation, enjoying the while to the full the consciousness of being an extraordinary person, a sort of literary Æneas, _multum jactatus et terris et alto_. And I answer briefly:

"The Navy."

I hasten to add, however, that you will find my answer coloured by a passion for the beauty and the mystery of the sea with which some good spirit endowed me in my cradle. I was born in one of the most historic of New England seacoast towns where brine was anciently said to flow through the veins of the inhabitants. On midsummer days the fierce heat distils from the cracked, caked mud of tidal meadows the clean, salty smell of the unsullied sea; dark ships, trailing far behind them long, dissolving plumes of smoke, weave in and out between the tawny, whale-backed islands of the bay, and tame little sea birds almost the colour of the shingle run along at the edge of the in-coming tide. So I admit a bias for the service of the sea.

Does the Navy demand as much of the sailor as the Army does of the soldier? A vexed question. The Army, comparing grimly its own casualty lists with the Navy's occasional roll sometimes imagines naturally enough that the sailor lives, as the old hymn has it, "on flowery beds of ease." As a whole there is no denying that living conditions are far better in the naval service, though much depends on the boat to which the sailor is assigned. A soldier in the trenches sleeps in his clothes, so does a sailor on a destroyer or a patrol boat, and I do not believe that I felt much more comfortable at the end of a long trip in an old destroyer during which the vessel rolled, pitched, tossed, careened, stood on her head, sat on her tail and buckled than I did after a week or so at the front. Certainly, there was little to choose between the overcrowded living quarters of the sailors and a decent "dug-out." True, the "Toto," alias greyback, alias "Cootie" or his occasional but less famous accomplice the "crimson rambler" does not infest a Navy ship. How many times have I not heard Army folk say in heartfelt tones, "Those Navy people can keep _clean_." But a truce to the Cootie. Much more has been made of him than he deserves. During the first six months of the war the creature was in evidence, but after the hostilities began to limit themselves to the trench swathe, and this localizing war made possible a stable system of hospitals, cantonments and baths, the Cootie became as rare as a day in June and to have such guest was an indication of abysmally bad luck or personal uncleanliness. Moreover, a little gasoline begged from a lorry driver and sprinkled on one's clothes confers unconditional immunity. Consider the crew of a submarine. They do not have to splash about in a gulley of smelly mud the consistency of thick soup, or wander down alleyways of red brown mud, so cheesy that it sticks to the boots till one no longer lifts feet from the ground, but shapeless, heavy, thrice cussed lumps of mire. No one has yet risen to sing the epic of the mud of France; yet 'tis the soul of the war. The submarine sailors are spared the mud, but they live in a sealed cylinder into which sunlight does not penetrate, live in the close atmosphere of a garage; they can not get exercise or change clothes. A submarine crew that has had a hard time of it looks quite as worn out as soldiers just out of battle and their colour is far worse. And if there is a more heroic service than this submarine patrol, I should like to know of it.

And now the army in me rises to protest. "I admit," says the military voice, "that service on ships may be a confounded sight more disagreeable than I had imagined, but the sailor has a chance when he gets to port of changing his uniform, whilst a poor lad of a soldier must fight, eat, and sleep in the same old uniform, and must limit his changes to a change of underclothes."

True, oh military spirit. Civilian, and thou, too, oh sailor, do you know what it is to be confined, to be wedded, without jest, "till death do us part" to _one_ suit. One faithful, persistent, necessary uniform and _one_ only. Two-thirds of the joy of permission is the pleasure of getting out of a dirty, stale, besweated uniform. Heaven bless, Heaven shower a Niagara of happiness on those kindly ladies who sent us supplies of socks and jerseys! Don't be content to knit Johnny socks and a sweater, keep on knitting him a number of them, and send them over at intervals. The dandies of a section used to leave extra clothes in villages behind the lines. Alas, sometimes, the group, after service "_aux tranchées_" was not marched back to the same village, and it was difficult to get permission to visit the other village, even were it near. Such expedients, however, are for luxurious times. Quite often there are no habitable villages for miles behind the lines, or else the civilian inhabitants have been ruthlessly warned away. In such circumstances there is no clean cache of clothes to be left behind in Madame's closet. But the sailor ... though he returns as grimy as a printers' devil and as bearded as a comic tramp, there is always a clean suit of "liberty blues" in his bag, and to-morrow, clad in the handsomest of all naval uniforms, he will be found ashore, breaking fair British or Irish hearts.

I have tried to show that in the judgment of an ex-soldier, the difference between the life of a sailor in a fighting ship and the life of a soldier in a fighting regiment is by no means as great as it has been imagined. The army, I suppose, will grumble at such a pronunciamento. Let an objector, then, try being a lookout man all winter long on a destroyer ... or try firing a while. All is not quite purgatorial even at the front. Most army men know of quiet places along the line held on our side by rubicund, wine-bibbing, middle-aged French "territoriaux," _bons pères de famille_ who show you pictures of Etienne and Maurice; and garrisoned on the enemy's border by fat old Huns who want very, very much to get home to their great pipe and steaming sauerkraut. In such places each side apologizes for the bad taste of their supporting artillery, whilst grenade throwing is regarded as the bottom level of viciousness. Once in a while people die there of old age, gout, or chronic liver. No one is ever killed. Such "ententes cordiales" were far more frequent than those behind the line have ever suspected. On the other hand, some twenty miles down the trench swathe there may be a hillock constantly contested, a strategic point which burns up the lives of men as casually as the sustaining of a fire consumes faggots. Now it is the quick, merciful bullet in the head, now the hot, whizzing éclat of a high explosive, now the earthquake of the subterranean mine. But after all, a mine at sea is no more gentle than one on land, and to have a mine exploded under him is perhaps the eventuality which a soldier fears more than anything else. On land, the thundering release of a giant breath from out of the earth, a monstrous pall of fragments of soil, stones, and dust ... perhaps of fragments more ghastly, at sea, a thundering pound, a column of water which seems to stand upright for a second or two and then falls crashing on whatever is left of the vessel. _Quelle monde!_

There is a distinct difference between the psychology of the soldier and that of the sailor. A soldier of any army is sure to be drilled, and drilled, and drilled again till he becomes what he ought to be, a cog in an immense machine scientifically designed for the release of violence; a sailor, drilled scientifically enough but not so machinally, preserves some of the ancient freedom of the sea. Then, too, the soldier with his bayonet is a fighting force; the sailor, though prepared for it, himself rarely fights, but works a fighting mechanism, ... the ship. The battleship X may sink the cruiser Y, but there is rarely a "_corps a corps_" such as takes place for instance in a disputed shell crater. Thus removed from the baser brutalities of war, the sailor never reveals that vein of Berserker savagery which soldiers will often reveal in a conquered province. As a class, sailors are the best-natured, good-hearted souls in the world. Rough some may be, some may be scamps, but brutal, never. Moreover, living under a discipline easier to bear than the soldiers, Jack has not the sullen streaks that overtake betimes men under arms. Of course, he grumbles, enlisted men are not normal if they don't grumble, but Jack's grumbling is as nothing compared to the fierce, smothered hate for things in general which every soldier sometimes feels.

I would follow the sea, because I am a lover of the mystery and beauty of the sea, and because my comrades would be sailormen. I would knock at the Navy's door because, after all is said and done, the naval power is the ultima ratio of this titanic affair. I have seen many of the great scenes of this war, among them Verdun on the first night of the historic battle, but nothing that I saw on land impressed me as did my first view of the British Grand Fleet in its northern harbour, ... the dark ships, the hollow ships, rulers of the past, rulers of the future, unconquered and unconquerable.

H.B.B.

The Parson Capen House, Topsfield, 1919.

END

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N.Y.