Part 9

There are mines of offensive and defensive purposes—such as you lay in front of your own harbors to protect you, and such as you lay in front of the doors of your enemy. The first ones you might want to move again; therefore, they are so constructed that you can handle them again, provided you know the secret of construction. The other kind you don’t expect to touch again, and they are, therefore, so constructed that anyone who tampers with them will blow himself up. Secondly, should the Italians surprize us, there would be little chance for us to escape. We could steam only about ten knots an hour, while any cruiser or torpedo could steam over twenty. The only armament we had was one 75-millimeter Hotchkiss gun in the bow. There would be no surrender, either. He would blow the barge and his own steamer up first.

“Here,” he said, pointing to a tin can the size of a tomato can, with ready short fuse attached, “is the bomb to be thrown in the barge, and here,” looking down into the forward hold, “is the other one, ready to blow us into eternity. Now, if you want to stay, you’re welcome; if not, take the launch back to Trieste.”

Capt. M——, after a brief inspection, went back with the launch to Trieste, while I stayed and photographed with the moving picture camera.

There is a long international law governing the laying and exploding of mines, and there has been considerable controversy about the unlawful laying of anchored and drifting mines. There are land-, river-, and sea-mines. Mines laid for the protection of harbors are usually exploded by electric batteries from an observing officer on shore. Others are exploded by contact. The mechanical devices to accomplish this are manifold. The policy adhered to is usually to construct a mine so as to incur the least danger, when handling them, to yourself, and with the opposite results to your enemy. This holds true as long as the secret of construction can be kept from the enemy. The Italians on a night invasion had dropped mines on the Austrian coast that would explode when tilted only at an angle of twenty-five degrees. A little vial of acid would spill over and explode the charge. One day, when a heavy sea was running, some of the mines exploded, betraying the location of the mine field, and the Austrians “killed” the rest of them with minesweepers.

Mine fields are discovered by shallow-draft steamers looking for them in clear water or dragging for them. The aeroplane is also an excellent scout. From a height of 1,000 feet he can look a good depth into the sea and see a mine or submarine. On my flight over Grado, on the Italian coast, I could see a mine field and all shallows of a channel wonderfully well from a height of 6,000 feet. When the hydroplane sees a mine an automatic float is dropped that marks the locality, and the mines boat comes along and either lifts it or blows it up.

Here these Italian mines were of a late and very expensive construction. They consisted of three parts—the mine, the anchor, and a 100-pound weight; all three connected with a wire cable. The weight is an ordinary oval lump of iron, attached by a cable to the anchor. The anchor is a steel cylinder; the upper part is perforated; the lower half is a tank with a hole in the bottom and sides to allow the water to enter and sink it. The mine is a globe two and one-half feet in diameter, which fits into the barrel-like anchor up to its equator.

The weight, cable, and anchor holding the mine are rolled from the mine-laying ship, overboard. The weight sinks to the bottom, holding the mine in the spot. Next, the water entering the tank slowly fills it, and it sinks at the designated place. The mine, being buoyant, has detached itself from the sinking anchor and is pulled down with the anchor and floats now at a depth of eight to twelve feet from the surface. The water now dissolves a peculiar kind of cement that has held a number of pistons. The pistons, being released, spring out and snap in place all around the equator of the mine. Comes a vessel in contact with the mine, these protruding points, made of brittle metal, break off and a spring releases a cartridge with explosive. This cartridge, with a detonating cap on the bottom, drops upon a point and explodes the initial charge, which again explodes the charge in the mine.

In lifting the mine a rowboat with three men rows up over the mine, and by means of a tube shutting off the refraction of the light rays a person can look into the water. With a boat-hook and attached rope, a shackle on the top of the mine is caught, the pole unscrewed, the rope is taken into a winch aboard the steamer or barge, and the mine is then carefully hoisted. When the mine comes to the surface the mine engineer rows up, presses down a lever, and secures it with a steel pin. This performance locks the spring and prevents the cartridge from dropping on the piston. Next, the mine is hoisted on the barge, the top is unscrewed, and the cartridge holding the initial explosive charge is taken out, rendering the mine harmless with ordinary handling. The cylinder-like anchor is then hoisted by the attached cable, and last the weight is brought up.

We were busy hoisting and searching for mines till 3 p. m. Another tugboat, the _San Marco_, was also steaming around in our vicinity, keeping a sharp lookout for hostile men-of-war, and also, when seeing a mine, dropping a float. The fog had lifted a little, and once in a while we could see the outlines of houses on the shore. We had six mines on the barge and three on our steamer, when the launch which had taken me out hove in sight to take me back for dinner. Captain K—— said: “Well, we have been lucky so far; we have only one more mine to take up, and I had a good mind to blow it up and hike for home.”

“Good,” I said, “then I’ll unpack my cameras again and take a picture of the explosion.” At this moment the _San Marco_ gave a signal of three short blasts. I looked toward the Italian coast and saw two men-of-war loom up in the fog; then two more. Two had four funnels each and were cruisers; the other two were torpedo-boat destroyers.

“Enemy in sight.” “Clear the ship.” “Jump aboard.” “Cut the barge adrift,” came in sharp commands from Captain K——.

Six men at the windlass were lowering a mine carefully onto the deck of the barge. They let it drop so suddenly that the men guiding it jumped aside in terror. All hands jumped from the barge aboard our steamer. The ropes holding the barge alongside were cut, the bells clanged in the engine-room, and we shot ahead. Fog had momentarily blotted the vessels out again and gave a false sense of security. “Make the towing hawser fast; we’ll tow her,” shouted K——. Three men tried to belay the hawser, but we had too much headway on already, and the rope tore through their fingers.

“Throw the bomb into her.”

The bomb flew across, but fell short; then I saw a flash of lightning in the fog, and the next moment a huge fountain of water rose on our starboard side, and the shell flew screaming past us. Boom! boom! boom! Now all four ships gave us their broadsides and the stricken sea spouted geysers all around us and the _San Marco_. Screaming shells and roaring guns filled the fog.

“Twelve hundred meters,” quoth K——. “They should soon get the range.” I looked at our little Hotchkiss on the fore deck—there was no use to reply even. The _San Marco_ had described a half-circle and came running up astern of us as if, like a good comrade, she was going to share our fate with us. As she came abreast of our Barge K—— shouted, “Drop a bomb into her.”

“I have only one ready for my own ship,” the captain yelled back.

“They will get our whole day’s work,” growled K——.

“Hurray!” we all shouted the next minute, as a shell struck the barge full center, exploding the six mines and shattering it in bits, enveloping all in a dense cloud of black smoke.

At this moment the other launch came alongside and raced along with us. I threw my cameras into it, and jumped aboard; then we sheared off again, so as not to give the enemy too big a target.

Next minute three shells shrieked so close to our ears that we threw ourselves flat in the bottom of the launch and one shaved the deck of No. 10. There seemed to be no escape. The Italians cut us off from Trieste, and we headed for Miramar. They did not come nearer; but the Lord knows they were near enough, and by rights they should have sent us to the bottom the first three shots. Even had they steamed directly up to us, they could have got us by the scruff of the neck in five minutes, for we could make only ten knots to their twenty-five.

One fast torpedo-boat, risking what was a few hours ago their own mine field, and, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary, got the No. 10 and our launch in line and gave us all attention in the manner of a pot-hunter trying to rake us. I had just taken my moving picture camera out of its case and set it on the tripod when a shell struck three feet from the launch, raising a big geyser. The column of water descending douched us and stopped our motor. I had to dry off the spark plugs while the engineer got busy cranking.

Happily, the motor sprang right on again, and I got back to the camera and commenced cranking. I tried to keep the No. 10 and the _San Marco_ in the view-finder in case they should get hit, and endeavored to get the spouting of the shells. I got about one hundred feet of it, but it is a tame illustration of all the excitement of a race between life and death. The Italians with their speed, having passed us, now swung around again and edged us off from Miramar, so we held to the west of it for our shore batteries.

All this time we kept wondering why the next shell didn’t strike one of us. Then we saw one of our submarines just diving to the periscope. By this time we came nearly within range of our shore batteries, and one of them began to bark at the Italians, but at such range and in the fog they must have just tried to scare them, for we couldn’t even see the shells hitting the water. However, we escaped “by the skin of our teeth.”

As the fog had lifted a little around noon, and we could see the houses on shore, evidently the lookouts had reported our presence and the Italians had left Grado to tackle us. The obscurity of the fog, the strange-looking barge, the _San Marco_, the proximity of the mine fields, all this had rendered the Italians so cautious that they were satisfied to run parallel with us and give us their broadside. The last we saw of them was when they swung more and more around toward their own coast and were again enveloped in the fog. They were the same four vessels that had bombarded us the day before, when I flew with Lieut. D—— in a hydroplane over Grado.

COSTS MORE NOW

Adam gave one rib and got a wife. Robert Kirton, of Pittsburgh, back from the front, lost seven ribs and then married his Red-Cross nurse. This shows the increased cost of living.

WEIGHTY MEASURES INVOLVING UNCLE SAM’S NAVY

THIS is the story of a conspiracy against Uncle Sam—a patriotic plot to be sure, for it is concerned with the son of a Spanish War veteran who was rejected for service in Uncle Sam’s Navy because he was seven pounds shy of weight for height, the said son’s up-and-down dimension being full six feet. It is a story of superfeeding conducted while the young man was skillfully kept a prisoner—albeit a willing one, but just to guard against his “jumping his feed”—by placing his nether garments carefully under lock and key. The New York _Sun_ tells the tale and its happy outcome. It happened in this way:

Young Walter Francis everlastingly did want to get into the Navy and stop this _U_-boat nonsense once and for all. Wherefore last Saturday bright and early Potential Admiral Francis took his bearings from the compass he wears on his watch chain, yelled, “Ship ahoy!” to the skipper of a passing Brooklyn trolley car, boarded a starboard seat well aft in the car, and then set sail over the waves of Brooklyn asphalt toward the recruiting plant of the Second Naval Battalion of Brooklyn at the foot of Fifty-second street, Bay Ridge.

“Step on,” directed the examining surgeon to young Mr. Francis, indicating the scales in his office. “Step off. Now step out—you’re seven pounds shy for a six-footer.”

Half an hour later Walter Francis, dejected and forlorn, appeared before his father.

“’Smatter, son?” inquired the Spanish War vet.

“’Smatter, pop! There’s seven pounds the matter! Uncle Sam can do without me.”

Mrs. Francis came into the room and heard the depressing news of her short-weight son, and straightway conspiracy stalked silently upon the scene. Says the writer in the _Sun_:

A moment later a significant look passed between father and mother above and back of the bowed head of their son. Mr. and Mrs. Francis withdrew to the kitchen for a council of war. Then Spanish-American War Veteran Joe Francis walked into the front room again and stood before his underweight offspring.

“Take off our pants, Walter,” said Francis, senior, “And give me your—don’t sit there staring at me; get busy—give me your shoes. Ma, catch the boy’s pants when I throw ’em out to you. Lock his pants and shoes up with all his other pants and then start in cooking. Cook up everything you got in the house. And when you get a chance run down to Gilligan’s and tell him to send up five pounds of dried apples.”

“I’m on, pop!” suddenly shouted Embryo Admiral Walter Francis, springing to his feet alive once more. “You’re going to feed me up for a couple of weeks so I’ll make the weight. Gosh, you’re there with the bean, pop—I never woulda thought of the scheme.”

“For a couple of weeks!” cried Parent Francis scornfully. “For a couple of days, you mean, son. Come on into the dining-room and start right in to——. No, stay right where you are. Don’t move from now on unless you have to or you might lose another ounce. You just sit right there all day. Ma will do the cooking and I’ll be the waiter. And if you’re not up to weight inside of three days then I’m a German spy. And don’t weaken. Just keep in mind that even if you do it won’t get you anything. For I’m going to keep the key to all your pants right in my pocket till you cripple the weighing scales. So all you’re going to do from now on is stick around and eat.”

Already Mrs. Francis had passed into the room a nightshirt and a three-quart pitcher brimming with sparkling Croton. Without a pause Parent Francis had filled a tumbler and passed it on to his offspring, who eagerly drained the glass. Tumbler after tumbler of water was tumbled into the digestive system of the underweight linotyper, while steadily from the kitchen came the happy sizzling of four pork chops and fast-frying potatoes with trimmings.

Twenty-one glasses of water disappeared into young Walter Francis before Saturday’s sun had set, together with all the pork chops, the fried potatoes, thick slices of buttered bread, and some other snacks.

The Sunday treatment included fourteen glasses of water and a general packing-in of fattening fodder, until dinner-time arrived, when son Walter was fed up on two pounds of steak smothered in boiled potatoes with trimmings of stewed corn and mashed turnips, all resting on a solid foundation of well-buttered bread and roofed with a generous slab of apple pie. And then:

One and one-quarter pounds of mutton-chops merely formed the architectural approaches to the breakfast Walter Francis found staring him in the face when he arose heavily on Monday morning. Ham and eggs in groups—salty ham which hadn’t been parboiled, thus retaining its thirst-arousing properties—was the centerpiece around which the luncheon Mrs. Francis had prepared that day for her son was draped. A dinner that ran all the way from soup to nuts (the time was growing short if Parent Francis was to make good on his promises) followed on Monday night, the big noise of the Monday dinner being a sirloin steak.

And just before Son Francis decided to call it a day and waddle to bed Spanish-American War Veteran Francis had a final happy thought. Father fed son a plentiful supply of dried apples and then unleashed a growler and went down to the corner and got a quart of collarless beer. Walter Francis flooded the dried apples with the entire quart of beer, cried “Woof! I’m a hippopotamus!” and collapsed into bed.

Tuesday morning last Father and Mother Francis personally helped their son toward the street-door after he had breakfasted on five pork-chops, two cups of coffee and four rolls. Once more he was about to set sail for the Second Naval Battalion recruiting office at the foot of Fifty-second Street, where three days earlier he had been turned down as hopelessly shy on tonnage. Parent Francis helped his bouncing boy aboard the trolley-car, shouting a last word of caution to walk, not run, to the nearest entrance to the recruiting station.

And just before young Mr. Francis applied again for the job of ridding the seas of _U_-boats (it should be mentioned incidentally that about half an hour earlier his father had unlocked a pair of pants and other gent’s furnishings for the trip) the potential admiral saw the burnished sign on a corner saloon. He got off the car carefully, drank seven glasses of water in the saloon and then eased his way into the presence of the surgeon who had given him the gate on Saturday.

“I told you before you were many pounds underweight, young man,” said the surgeon. “It’s utterly useless for you to come around here when——”

“But that was away last week, Doc,” wheezed young Mr. Francis. “Give me another try at your scales.”

“My Gordon!” cried the surgeon, glancing at the scales and uttering his favorite cuss-word. “Saturday you were seven pounds under weight and to-day you’re a pound overweight! How’d yuh ever do it?”

“I’ve heard of lads getting their teeth pulled to get out of serving Uncle Sam, but you’re the first guy I ever heard of who made a fool of his stummick to get into the Navy,” grinned Bos’n Carroll as Walter Francis bared his brawny arm for the vaccine. “Welcome to our ocean, Kid!”

NEVER TALK BACK

“——and then the Germans charged, and the captain shouted, ‘Shoot at will,’ and I shouted, ‘Which one is he?’ And then they took away my gun, and now I can’t play any more.”

GOING HOME

Visitor—“And what did you do when the shell struck you?”

Bored Tommy—“Sent mother a post-card to have my bed aired.”

ENLISTED MEN TELL WHY THEY JOINED THE ARMY

OUR first forces in France were volunteers, part of the old regular Army, though many of the enlistments were recent. The motives leading men to join such an army are varied and in many cases humorous or pathetic. A Y. M. C. A. secretary in France, who had won the confidence of the men with whom he was associated, wondered why each man had come. So he arranged that they should hand in cards telling why they had enlisted. Mr. Arthur Gleason presents some of the answers in the New York _Tribune_ as “the first real word from the soldier himself of why he has offered himself.” These replies came from two battalions of an infantry regiment, which, for military reasons can not be identified. Mr. Gleason puts them in several groups. One is the sturdily patriotic. Thus, one soldier says:

“My reason in 1907 was that I liked the service and wanted to try for something new and bright for my country.”

Others say: “Because my country needs me”; “to catch Villa”; “I wanted to get the Kaiser’s goat”; “for the benefit of the American Army”; “so patriotic and didn’t know what it was”; “Mexican trouble, 1917”; “I felt like my country needed me, and I wanted to do something for it, and that was the only way I was able to do anything for my dear country, the good old U. S. A.”; “I never did anything worth while on the outside, so I dedicated myself to my country that I might be of some use to some one”; “a couple of Germans”; “to serve God and my country.”

Another class of answers deal with what is in the blood of youth—the desire to taste adventure, to see the world, and see France. Here are a few in this group:

“To do my duty and see the world”; “to see the world, ha! ha!”; “because I thought I would like that kind of a life, and didn’t know what kind of a life I would have to lead in this hole”; “got tired of staying at home”; “I was seeking adventure and change of environments”; “to kill time and fight”; “to see France”; “I was discouraged with the civilian life and wanted to get some excitement”; “to have a chance to ride on the train; I never had ridden”; “they said I was not game and I was, and because I wished to”; “because I wouldn’t stay in one place any length of time, I thought if I joined the Army for three or seven years I would be ready to settle down. I think that is as good a thing as any boy could do”; “to see the world”; “I had tried everything else, so I thought I would try the Army.”

Another group of answers deal with the individual human problem of hunger and loneliness. These that follow illustrate this:

“To fight, and for what money was in it”; “three good square meals and a bath”; “because I was disgusted with myself and thought it would make a man out of me”; “I was too lazy to do anything else”; “I was stewed”; “to get some clothes, a place to sleep and something to eat”; “because I was hungry”; “because I was nuts with the dobey heat” (dobey is a Mexican slang word brought up by the boys from the border); “because I had to keep from starving;” “in view of the fact that I was so delicate and a physical wreck I joined the Army, hoping to get lots of fresh air and exercise, which I have sure gotton, and am ready to go home at any time”; “I was in jail and they came and got me. Hard luck!”; “because I did not have no home”; “I got hungry”; “pork and beans were high at the time”; “three square meals a day and a flop.”

The voice of State rights speaks in the replies of two men from the South:

“To represent the State of Kentucky.”

“In answer to a call from my State, Mississippi, and to see something of the world, and I have seen some of the world, too.”

Then, too, there are a number that refuse to be classified; each has its own note of suffering or audacity of humor:

“To catch the Kaiser”; “because the girls like a soldier”; “because my girl turned her back on me, that’s all”; “I thought I was striking something soft, but ...”; “the dear ones at home”; “I was crazy”; “two reasons: because girls like soldiers and I saw a sign ‘500,000 men wanted to police up France’”; “for my health and anything else that is in it” (a consumptive soldier); “to show that my blood was made of the American’s blood”; “to learn self-control”; “it was a mistake; I didn’t know any better”; “for my adopted country”; “I got drunk on Saturday, the Fourth of July, 1913, and I left home on the freight-train and joined the Army, and woke up the next morning getting two sheets in the wind, and I haven’t got drunk since that; made a man out of me”; “to keep from working, but I got balled”; “I have not seen anything yet but rain”; “because I didn’t know what I was doing”; “to kill a couple of Germans for the wrong done Poland”; “to keep from wearing my knuckles out on the neighbors’ back doors”; “adventure and experience; also, to do my little bit for my country, the good old U. S. A., and the Stars and Stripes, the flag of freedom”; “to fight for my country and the flag, for the U. S. is a free land, and we will get the Kaiser, damn him. Oh, the U. S. A.!” (Picture of a flag.)

One man makes out a complete category of his reasons: (_a_) “To see excitement”; (_b_) “to help win this war and end the Kaiser’s idea of world ruler”; (_c_) “help free the German people from Kaiserism.”

And, finally, there is one that needs no comment, and with this we will end:

“Because mother was dead and I had no home.”

THE NATIONAL GAME