Part 5

I HAVEN'T anything to tell about. Being torpedoed is an old story now. Any number of men have met Fritz on the way over, and, if they haven't been quick enough, he's managed to take a shot at them, but it isn't often we fail to get a chance to return fire. Just let a periscope stick its head out of water, and I'll show you action on deck that would make a Kansas cyclone look tame--not that I've seen one. My home is in the East. The best we can boast about is a blizzard or two, and a sixty-mile gale.

I enlisted as a signalman, and was assigned to duty on a merchant ship. There were two other U. S. N. signalmen aboard her, and we managed to make the time fly talking about home and the people we knew.

One of our prize ways of speeding up a long evening on shipboard was to swap notes on the summers we had spent. We all three, at different times, had "vacated" in the Maine woods, almost at the identical spot, and, do you know, we hailed the fact with something very close to triumph!

I guess we three hashed over every little incident of our trips. We found we had had the same close-mouthed Indian guide, that we had all fished on the same bank of a little lost lake, that we had all camped on the same site in a clearing by the water. But when we discovered that we had used the same sort of tackle, and the same-sized rifles, we were almost "moved to tears," as the lady novelists put it.

Those things, small as they seem, are the most important things in the world when you are far away from home. They certainly make men inseparable, and, aside from the fact that Dick Chamberlain and Tod Carlin and I were the only Americans aboard, we became, from the first, the best pals in the world.

We were proceeding as flagship of a convoy, and, as such, we kept an extra sharp lookout for trouble, once we were in the zone.

It was three o'clock on the afternoon of a clear September day. The sea was smooth and we were all on deck. The sky was so blue and the sun so bright that it seemed as though the lurking submarine we were always expecting was a myth like the sea serpent you read about but never see. Night time is the time you are looking for an attack, but broad daylight always seems to dispel thoughts of danger. However, the danger was there.

We were struck close by the engine rooms. All I remember clearly was the terrific roar and splintering of wood, and the sudden listing of the ship. The order rang out to clear the ship and the crew immediately took to the life-boats in the event of rapid settling.

We three found ourselves assigned to the same life-boat. There was a slight delay in lowering it. That delay was fatal. The explosion that we had been expecting blew our boat to pieces and we found ourselves struggling in the water.

The officers' boat had been lowered and it drew up alongside of us. They helped us in. The captain was all for going back to his ship. He was sure there was no immediate danger of her sinking. The water-tight compartments fore and aft were holding and he called for volunteers to go aboard and help in an attempt to beach the ship.

By this time the other life-boats were beyond hailing distance and we found out afterward that the men in them, including some British gunners, were picked up later by patrol boats.

Of course, all the occupants of the remaining boats volunteered. I didn't particularly like the looks of the ship, as her well docks were on the sea level, but she had stopped settling and we followed the rest aboard.

It seemed queer to be on her again. There were just a handful of us, the rest of our mates were out of sight, bound for none of us knew where. It was like returning to a ghost ship, she lay so still on the waters, rocking softly, the waves washing over her deck.

There was plenty of work for all hands--it didn't give us time to think. I was glad of that. Dick and Tod and I joked a bit about what the people back home would say now, if they could see us up to our ankles in water on a sinking ship. Afternoon changed to evening. Still we saw no sign of help coming toward us. However, just so long as Fritz stayed away we were satisfied. When it got good and dark, though, we weren't quite so pleased. It helps, I can tell you, to be able to see your hand before your face. You feel a lot happier then.

Late that night we made out something coming toward us. We weren't sure whether it was friend or foe. It gave us a bad few minutes, then we made out the towboats who had come to our assistance. We were so glad to see them that we almost cheered out loud, which is one thing you don't do in the Zone.

We passed them lines, and they steered a course for land. All this time our ship was slowly working water; you could tell it by measuring, but the chief engineer continued to assure the captain that we would be successful in beaching her.

All night we moved slowly through the water, wondering each minute when she would take a sudden dive to the bottom. Walking along the edge of a canyon in the dark is much the same sensation, I guess. We were glad when we saw a pale streak in the sky, and watched the morning star fade. Daybreak found us still afloat.

Some of the British crew had had experience on torpedoed ships. I suppose they knew that the wise thing to do was to leave her if they got the chance. That was the reason why they chose to go on the escort vessel when the captain put it up to them. By morning it certainly looked as if our ship would never be beached on this earth. We were in water up to our knees. There wasn't a dry spot on us, and the chill winds that swept down from the north played a game of hide-and-seek through our wet clothes.

The captain called us all together. He told us that the chances for bringing her in were small, that no man need stand by, that he did not blame anyone for choosing dry land and dry clothes in preference to almost certain sinking.

His speech did not shake the officers' determination to remain aboard her--all of them. They simply had no intention of getting off so long as there was a glimmer of a chance of landing her safe. Then the captain asked Dick if he desired to remain or if he wanted to get off. Dick grinned.

"I'll stay, sir," he said.

The captain asked Tod.

"I'll stay, too, sir," he answered.

The captain came to me. I had my answer ready.

"I'll stay, sir," I told him.

After he had thanked us and gone on, Dick called a meeting of the Three Yanks. "You didn't stand by just because I volunteered to, did you?" he asked anxiously. We shook our heads. Our teeth were chattering so that it was hard to say what we thought, so we didn't try. What I thought was something to the effect that I wished I had my extra sweater on underneath, and that I was glad I had two such plucky pals.

We spent another night on board her. We had had not slept for forty-eight hours, but we didn't seem to need to--the excitement of wondering what the next minute would bring banished sleep.

The following morning at four o'clock we landed safely on the beach. The destroyers took us off the ship--all we knew was that at last we were on something where we could rest. I remember some of the crew asking us questions, but I don't remember our answering. We just dropped down on a roll of blankets and closed our eyes. . . .

I woke last. Dick and Tod were chatting softly in a corner. I opened my eyes and listened.

"Well, write it down, Tod, so you don't forget," Dick was saying. "You and Clink and I will hike it for Maine. Is that straight?"

"What's this?" I asked. Dick grinned over at me.

"We're making a little date for after the war," he said. "We figured what a lot we'd have to talk about on that camping trip, eh?"

I nodded. "You can count me in," I said.

But, as it's turned out, there won't be any camping trip for the three of us after all. Dick was lost at sea on his next trip across, while I was sick in hospital. Then I heard that Tod had gone down, and it nearly knocked me out. There never were two such pals as those chaps.

Perhaps some day when it's all over, and we've licked the Hun to a standstill, I'll wander up there myself with our stony-faced guide; and perhaps I'll sit on the bank of our little lake and fish in the clear water with the tackle we all used, or shoot the same-sized rifle--and I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that they've trod every inch of the ground--it will be almost like having them there--but not quite--pals like that don't happen more than once in a lifetime--I wish I could tell you just what great sort of fellows they were--oh, well, I couldn't if I tried a thousand years--so what's the use?

SEAMAN BURKE SPEAKS:

A TASTE OF HELL

I JOINED the Navy as an apprentice seaman. I thought it would be great to try a new way of licking the Huns. I had sampled the army. Yes, I was at the Somme with the Canucks. Greatest bunch of fighters the world has ever seen!

I can say it, because I'm an American, but as soon as war was declared, my three cousins and I beat it for Canada and enlisted. We were all in the same regiment, the third to go across.

You've no idea until you get into the thick of a fight with shrapnel whistling past you and shells bursting a few feet away, how much depends on your leader. It's up to him to win or lose the ground you're holding for all you're worth. The men in charge of us were young and some of them pretty green at the war game--but say! there wasn't a bloody Hun alive that could scare them! Not by a long sight!

We sailed in August, about two thousand of us. We had a quiet trip across and, oh, Christmas! how we did long to get into the scrap! They landed us at a French port and we had just three days' training before we were ordered up.

You can't make much headway in three days to prepare you to meet the Boches, but we did manage to get in a little drilling and skirmishing. All the bayonet charging I learned was from a Jap in my company. He was a funny little cuss. Why he joined up I can't imagine. You'd think he would rather save his skin and stay at home, but he was all for fighting. He had been trained in Japan and had joined the Canadians at the last minute.

My cousins and I learned all we knew from him. He seemed glad to show us. He was a friendly little chap and some fighter! I remember seeing him alongside of me for a few seconds in a trench full of Germans . . . and then not seeing him. What became of him I never knew. You don't, most of the time.

A long line of troop trains were awaiting us. Pullmans? I guess not!--freights. We piled in. We were all anxious to get to the front. We knew they were in desperate need of men and that we might get a chance to go over the top, green as we were.

It was night before they opened the doors and let us out. We seemed to be in a sort of meadow. It was black as a cave, except for the lights of the station. There was plenty of noise as two thousand men alighted, but there was another sound--a dull, thick booming . . . cannons! It seemed thousands of miles away, but you never forgot it for an instant. It meant that we fellows who had been so recently in offices plugging away for so much a week were out there at last on the great battlefield of France!

We had reached the trenches. They weren't at all like I supposed they'd be. I expected them to be narrow, with room enough for one man only. Instead two and sometimes three could walk abreast. It seemed to me as though we marched a hundred miles that night. I was so tired I was ready to drop, and then all the mud I had ever read about seemed to be planted in that trench! Mud! We tramped through knee-deep slime--knee-deep, mind you--and we thought that was bad until we went in up to our waists.

It must have been raining pitchforks before we arrived, and as we scuffed along the best way we could it began again--a cold, driving rain straight down from the black sky, stinging our faces and running down our necks. After a while we halted for the night.

There were dugouts where you could set up your cook-stove if you were lucky enough to own one. All your food you carried on your back in cans, but you didn't have energy enough left to open them. You just dropped down under the shelter of a bunch of sandbags if you were lucky, or if you weren't, in a muddy patch of ground where you slept like a log.

Next day we were on our way--that long line of drenched men tramping toward the sound of the big guns. That's how you measured distance, by increasing volume. The rain had begun in earnest and it never let up for the three days we made our way to the trench just back of the Big Hill.

It seemed to be our destination, because we got orders to begin digging, and we went to work with pick and shovel. I forgot how tired I was in the excitement of being so near the Huns. You do out there. You don't worry about dying, that's one sure bet, nor about eating or sleeping; the one thing that gets you is when your best pals go west.

I had to stand watch that night. That meant two hours of pacing back and forth, fifteen feet, ready for the enemy's charge at any second. I couldn't believe that the fellows we were waiting for were so close up--there across that short patch of ground--but I realized it when a shell fell not five feet away from me and blew three of my pals to bits. By God! I knew it then!

I shall never forget it. I'd been listening to them talk in a little knot as I paced by, swapping smokes and trying to find a dry place to stand. One of them laughed. That was the last sound I heard before the crash of exploding shell. There wasn't one of them left.

We were four days waiting for the signal to charge. We were mad for it. It seemed as if the leaders could not hold us back another day. We wanted to get at those damned Huns who had killed our pals. We knew we could lick them, raw as we were. We had some full-blooded Indians from Ontario with us. They were the real thing in a fight. They did not know what fear meant. There just wasn't any such word in the language for them, and when they charged they forgot they were supposed to use rifles. They threw them away and drew their long knives--razor-sharp. That's how they went after the Huns--and butchered the swine good and proper.

On the fourth day the signal was passed along the trench for a charge. One hundred and fifty men were picked--every third man. I was lucky and was one of the number. Every man was keen to be first over the top. About nine of the Indians came along. None of my cousins made it, but the little Jap who had taught me bayoneting was beside me, grinning and fondling his rifle as a mother does her baby.

Our leaders sprang up on the sand bags and hurled us the order. How few of them came back from that charge on which they set out so fearlessly!

We climbed up. We heard our officers shouting to us and our comrades wishing us the best of luck, to give the Huns hell! We sprang forward and the Germans opened a rain of bullets from their machine guns full upon us and the men who followed. They swept our lines. Men reeled and fell to the left and right of me--just crumpled up like those little toys whose springs have snapped. Still we went on. We made the trench and I speared my first Boche. Got him, too! Brought back his iron cross as a trophy. The Germans were scampering to the next trench like rats caught in a trap. They sure do hate hand-to-hand fighting!

We held that trench six days. It was jumpy work. The Germans were driven back, but there was no telling when they would start with the hand-grenades. They didn't do that, but they did something worse--gas. It was pretty new to us then. We were fitted out with a sort of rubber mask that wasn't much good. We saw a fellow drop a way down the line. Then one of the brownish trench rats, a friendly little chap, who ate the scraps I shelled out to him, turned up his toes. We clapped on our masks, but the wind was with Fritz and the gas swept through our trench on the breeze.

It lasted about an hour and a half. I'd hate the job of being the first man ordered to take off his mask and test the air for the rest, but some one has to, and it often means lights out for him.

I had been slightly wounded--a sabre cut on my leg, but I managed to dress it myself. It was ten times better to be up, however rocky you felt, than lying around those damp trenches. I wondered where my cousins were. I worried about them. Somehow I wasn't afraid for myself, but I just wished it would soon be over and I could get home. You think about home an awful lot out there.

We were sent to some swamps next. There were cement trenches--German make--and they were considerably drier. We were pretty comfortable there except for an occasional shell blowing things to bits. I used to wonder how there was enough lead in the world to make all the shells the armies used. We always had plenty of ammunition. The Russians were the ones who got the raw deal. We passed a lot of them on our way out front. A regiment of them was holding a square. They were dull-eyed boys--hopeless looking. Do you blame them? One day they would be sent out with ammunition to burn. The next they wouldn't even be given a rifle. How did they protect themselves? Oh, rocks and stones, I suppose. But they were wiped out when they tried to charge empty-handed, that's sure.

The Germans raided us with hand grenades one night. We heard them coming and we fought like fiends, but they outnumbered us five to one. I went down with a shot in my side. The next thing I remembered was being aboard a transport bound for home. Nothing ever sounded so good to me as that word! I found my three cousins were aboard. One of them had lost his two legs, another his leg and his arm, and the youngest had his right arm blown off.

It didn't take me long to find out how lucky I was. All I needed to do was to look around at the other eighteen hundred wounded. They landed us at Halifax, on our way to Toronto. I was laid up for quite a while, and the funny thing was now that I was home again I kept planning ways to get back as soon as I could just to show those Huns who's who.

I used to lie in my clean white bed, looking out a long window onto the garden. It was calm and quiet. But I didn't seem to see it--what I saw were those blood-soaked trenches, with your pals gasping out their lives alongside of you and your leaders, falling even as they urged you to charge! It took me a while to get well and when I did I went back to the States. I had an idea. I would join the Navy. It would be a new way of meeting Fritz. I liked the thought of killing him wholesale on the sea.

I enlisted as an apprenticed seaman,--that was last March. I am in fine trim, except for a scar on my leg and a bullet hole in my side. I've finished training now and I'm ready to be shipped across. Gee, but I hope we'll get a fat submarine full of German officers--and that we'll drown them like the rats they are!

SECOND-CLASS GUNNER'S MATE FOWLER SPEAKS:

THE WANDERLUST AND THE WAR

I'VE been torpedoed three times--three ships gone down under me, and I'm still here. Didn't mind it much--I can swim; besides, I'm pretty used to the sea--first shipped when I was thirteen. My father and mother had sent me to a manual training school. I didn't like it. I was always playing hookey and finally ran away.

I didn't care where I went just so long as it was on a ship. I knew it was the sea I wanted. Before I decided, I used to hang around the docks. I liked the smell of the water and the big talk of the old salts who had been around the world a dozen times. They didn't stay cooped up in any four walls studying geography--they went out and lived it.

I knew enough about sailing to ship as boatswain. I was big for my age, so they took me on. It was a sand sucker going down to the mouth of the Mississippi.

The skipper took a kind of a shine to me. He saw I wanted to study navigation so he lent me books and let me go into the chart house and work. Arithmetic was hard for me, and spelling, too, but I'd copy out words I didn't know and take them to him. I guess he saw I was in earnest.

As a result I got my rate as able-bodied seaman when I was fifteen. I was in New Orleans then, and I saw a chance to ship on one of the Standard Oil boats bound for Tampico.

I was crazy to go to Mexico. There was a "Mex" on the old ship and he was always talking about the sunshine and free fruit in his country. When I told him where I was bound for he wanted to come, too, but my new skipper couldn't see him. "Mex" drank too much fire water for the good of one man.

We didn't stay long in Mexico. I got a chance to go through Vera Cruz, and that was about all, before starting for home. I'd saved quite a lot of money and all the way back to New York I kept asking myself would I or wouldn't I drop in on my father and mother to let them know I was alive. I couldn't decide. When I got to New York the first thing I did was to buy myself a great outfit; then I started to the street where I knew the family lived. On the way I met a pal who was shipping on a small boat leaving for Canada. He wanted me to go along. There didn't seem to be any good reason to refuse, seeing as I had all my papers. I'd never been to Canada.

I told him about wanting to call on my parents, but he said there'd be time enough when I got back to port. I went along with him and up to Nova Scotia.

All the time I told myself it was going to be my last trip up the coast. I wanted to see Europe next. When we came back to New York I went up to Union Hall and told them I'd like to ship across. I got my wish. They sent me on a Standard Oil steamer bound for Rouen. At last I was going to France!

I liked that country from the start. The first sight I had of it was white houses and green fields and church steeples. I was so busy looking at the scenery I couldn't do a stroke of work. I got liberty to go up to Paris, and I saw all of it for two francs. I just hopped into one of those little cabs and said to the driver "Giddap," and he rode me around. I didn't miss a thing.

We went back to Norfolk, where we were quarantined for seven days because a yellow cook we had broke out with the same color fever. That gave me time to think, and I made up my mind that I'd pay off and go up and see my folks. I was sixteen then, hard as nails and pretty prosperous.

Once ashore I bought myself everything from patent leather shoes to a derby hat. I wanted them to see I'd made good.

I walked in on them at dinner time. My father didn't know me, but my mother did. "It's George!" she hollered, then stared at me. But father didn't. He wanted to lick me for staying away all those years. Mother wouldn't let him, though. She wanted to hear all about where I'd been. I was glad I could put some money in the bank for her. I stayed home about two weeks and then got so restless I knew I'd better leave before they threw me out.

Well, I let myself in for an adventure that time for I went to Halifax, and from there shipped on an oil collier bound for Mexico. We struck a hurricane and were washed ashore. That was my first shipwreck. We had to eat stores out of the ship's supplies, which were pretty low at the time. I didn't like the looks of things and I decided to foot it into Tampico, which we figured wasn't more than forty-two miles south of us.

Eight of my mates and I figured that by traveling toward the sun, we'd make it in a couple of days. We packed our grub and put on the good heavy Dutch sea boots we wore in heavy weather, and set out through the woods.

Hot! Say, your head blistered under your cap. We struck a swamp, but we were afraid to go back--it was just as bad as going forward--so we started through, but we miscalculated, for we spent a whole day and night in there before we got our bearings.