The odyssey of a torpedoed tramp
Date: 2025-06-23T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: World War; 1914-1918 -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Tramp shipping -- Fiction

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Title: The odyssey of a torpedoed tramp

Author: Maurice Larrouy

Release date: June 23, 2025 [eBook #76361]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Constable and Company Ltd, 1918

Credits: deaurider and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ODYSSEY OF A TORPEDOED TRAMP ***

THE ODYSSEY OF A TORPEDOED TRAMP

BY

Y

LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
1918

PART ONE

S.S. “Pamir,”
Off the Coast of Morocco,
August 22, 1914.

Dear old Thing,

You must be wondering what has become of me in this unholy mix-up. How far it seems to our Fourteenth of July in New Orleans when we said good-bye at the Dollar Bar after a cake-walk to the sound of the gramophone! Here goes for my tale of woe.

Well, the Pamir was loading her cotton—five thousand bales—up to the twenty-fifth of July. It was hottish and we were in a hurry to clear for Liverpool and find cooler weather. The news, too, seemed a bit inflammable. American papers were getting up stunts in big headlines over Serbia and the rest, but we thought it a “try-on” of the pro-German press and the Hearst crowd. You guess we were glad to be going to see what was happening in France and what the old things thought about it.

We got under way at 2 a.m. At the start a d—— great sea-elephant just missed ramming us, but the Old Man steered like a wizard. I took the watch at three o’clock for Blangy, who was having a touch of fever and had been loading up with quinine for two days.

The ship nearly had sunstroke in the Gulf! Ninety-five on the bridge, one hundred and four in the cabin—not a breath of wind! In the Atlantic it freshened up a bit and Blangy reported fit again.

The boat was doing ten knots and a bittock, but at the end of three days our engine started racing like the very devil. The propeller shaft broke off short about a yard from the thrust block. We must have run into a submerged spar which had fouled the screw. It wouldn’t surprise me if a chunk of the propeller had gone to the bottom.

No good trying the S.O.S. stunt, as we have no wireless! Muriac, the engineer, was a wonder. He found some way of forging on our wretched anvil a couple of steel collars which he fixed on to the two broken ends of the shaft with eight bolts. That took two days. You can imagine how Old Man Fourgues cursed to see himself a-floatin’ like a bloomin’ buoy in the middle of the sea. You figure him, with his slant eyes and his goatee, shouting down the engine-room hatch every five minutes:

“Hullo there! Muriac! Will your turnspit be ready to turn by the time the grapes are ripe?”

“Another hour—maybe two!” yells Muriac. “But for God’s sake leave us alone!”

We got under way again after having drifted fifty miles to the west. Fourgues was afraid the engines would not run to more than ten knots, but the shaft was stronger than ever.

This delayed us considerably. On the night of the seventh of August we entered the Irish Channel and looked for lights. Search me! I had the watch and for three hours Fourgues blackguarded me like the expert he is, because I could not see a lighthouse or any other kind of light!

“What have I done to have a blind man like this? Get a new set of eyes! Run her aground! Shove her up against it! Get nice and close! You may see the lighthouses then. You’ll have made us lose three hours. This trip will never end!”

He couldn’t see the lighthouses any more than I and that was why he was making such a row about it. We had got almost near enough to touch land; you could see it, like a wharf—but devil a light anywhere!—when, all of a sudden, a craft going at full speed over-hauled us! It only showed lights at intervals. It kept its position as we could see it to port. I kept on my course. Bang! Bang! The ship fired twice with blank.

“The devil!” said Fourgues. “We have struck destroyers at practice. There must be others. Keep your weather eye skinned, my boy.”

I did! Bang! A shell fell ten yards ahead of us. The destroyer came up and yelled through the megaphone:

“Stop! Or we’ll sink you!”

Sir, we stopped! The destroyer came closer still. We could see nothing except a red hot cinder or so now and then.

“Who are you?”

“Pamir, French cargo-boat with cotton from America for Liverpool. Why do you stop us?”

“Oh! You’re French, are you?”

“Yes!”

“Right-oh! War’s declared!”

“By G——!” cried Fourgues and I at the same time and he fell on me and hugged me.

“Ça y est, my boy! We are having it out with the Boches!”

“What are you going to do?” yelled the destroyer.

“Go back to France!” answered Fourgues immediately, and added:

“Is England with us?”

“You bet!”

“Hurrah!” cried Fourgues. “Hard a-starboard and full speed for H——. We’ll report to the Admiralty.”

The destroyer accompanied us a little way and finally left us, calling:

“Good-bye and good luck!”

“Thanks. Same to you!”

You can’t deny it, Fourgues is a brick! No hesitation about his turning back to France! He slapped me on the back, offered me a cigar, and joked on the bridge.

“No wonder there weren’t any lights! It’s likely we’d show the Huns the way! Tumble down, my boy, and tell Muriac and Blangy. Rout them out if they are asleep. My word, won’t they stare! Send them to the bridge and bring up a bottle of fizz. My treat!”

Blangy and Muriac didn’t faint; the guns had awakened them, but they supposed it was manœuvres.

“Not pulling our legs?” they both said.

“No, to H—— with pull-legs. The Old Man will tell you.”

Every one embraced every one else. No one thought of sleep. On the bridge Fourgues tried to pour the champagne, but he spilled it on our hands in the dark, he was trembling so with excitement. We drank what was left.

“With all this,” he said, “we don’t know when the thing started. Pretty fools we look without wireless or anything! We might have butted into the Boches! However, all’s well. Decent chaps, the English, to be on our side. What should we have done if they had left us in the lurch?”

“What about the Russians?” queried Muriac.

“They’re all right!” said Fourgues. “We are all going in together.”

“And the Italians?” said Blangy.

“Um! We must get some information. Could you hit it up a bit, Muriac?”

“We ought to manage eleven knots. The coal is good and the shaft will hold.”

“All right. Let her rip! We must get to H—— to-morrow.”

We put on all the speed we could. As for me, I didn’t sleep. I had been counting on a leave in August while the boilers were being cleaned, and was going home, to La Rochelle. You know why, old man. I told you about it in New Orleans; it was to have been this year. What will she say, poor little thing? I had to put to sea again without seeing her!

The Pamir reached H—— at nine in the morning. Fourgues went to the Naval Préfecture and returned at noon with the daily papers and the news.

“No one knows what is to be done with the Pamir. We have to wait for orders. I wired to the owner; I asked the Admiral to unload the cotton. They told me to keep it pending further instructions. We are forbidden to touch anything. No examination of our engine or boilers! Muriac, your shaft will be looked after later! This afternoon a Naval officer will come aboard to settle the destination of officers and crew.”

If we had not been at war Fourgues would have exploded. To leave us with five thousand bales of cotton in the hold, the boilers and shaft unrepaired and without a notion of what we were going to do the next day! But he took it very well, even not being allowed to go ashore and the order to keep up steam.

The Naval officer, one of the Tin Hat sort, came on board about three o’clock. He mustered the crew, looked at the Service certificates, and in half an hour had fixed everything up. Muriac went, Blangy also. Half the deck crew and three-quarters of the engine-room artificers packed up and landed. The officer said that it was to man the war-vessels and coast-defences. He told us to leave that very evening for the port of —— in Morocco, where we should receive further orders. Fourgues became a bit restive.

“See here! You want me to run over to Morocco with two officers missing and half the crew?”

“We need the officers. Ships of war come first. Those registered for active service afloat serve in the Fleet, officers or men. As for men, we will send you at five o’clock a contingent of reservists, five seamen and ten engine-room ratings.”

“Might just as well leave me mine, who know the ship! My shaft is broken, my boilers are falling to bits!”

“Pooh! You’ll get on all right!”

“But coal? And provisions?”

“Go ahead; you can provision on the way if necessary. You are needed in Morocco.”

“To do what?”

“You will receive orders.”

“Can you let me have charts for Morocco? I have only those of America and Europe.”

“We’ll see. I don’t believe there are any left. We gave them all to the battleships.”

“I haven’t any wireless.”

“What’s the need? Are you afraid of meeting the Germans. We are guarding the routes.”

“And my five thousand bales of cotton?”

“No use to us! Please hold yourself in readiness to get under way at six o’clock, as soon as you have received your reservists. Do you understand?”

“All right.”

“Send all going ashore into my launch smartly. I still have three ships to deal with.”

Muriac, Blangy, and the men packed in five secs., believe me. They were in such a hurry that they hadn’t time to shake hands. What can have become of the beggars?

“This is a nice game,” says Fourgues to me when we were alone again. “You can take charge of the engines and we will take the watch by turns—the two of us—unless they send us some one who knows starboard from port. Hurry up! Go and write home—I’m going to do the same. It’s two years since I’ve seen my wife and the children at Orange. And you, poor devil of an engaged man! Oh, well, it doesn’t matter! I’m quite happy. They’ll find the old Pamir can account for herself.”

He shook hands. We both wanted to weep. To start like that, with a damned dislocated ship! We went below; he wrote to Orange, I wrote to La Rochelle—not much, you know; just to say that we were there and to address letters c/o the Admiralty with “Please forward” in large letters on the envelope. And then the reservists arrived. What in Fortune’s name had they sent us!

I can see now why they keep the “active service” reservists in the Navy. The others are too much of a good thing! For the deck, there was a croupier from Deauville, a tram-driver, a newsvendor, a shopman, a cabby; for the engine-room, a hotel lift-boy, a cinema man, three carriers, a bill-poster, a cattle-dealer, and three others of the same sort. What do they remember about the sea? They arrived, stupid, fat, and full of questions. We shoved ’em along proper! The lift-boy and the movie-man are to take duty in the boiler-room, the driver will steer, the movie-man also runs the dynamo. I forgot a chef of the Hotel Romantic at Monte Carlo! We bagged him for the officers’ table. If he can do anything with beans and bully beef he’s a wonder! As to Fabrice, whom you may remember—little Fafa who made such good cocktails at Galveston—he went forward again.

The Pamir left H—— at exactly six o’clock. No need to add that Fourgues and I did not shut an eye during the trip. Twelve hours’ watch apiece out of the twenty-four and filthy weather. The rest of the time I spent in the engine-room in overalls trying to see to overheating and leaks. At the Training School one learns little about mechanics—I am the more aware of this, having forgotten everything! The first day we had a lot of bother with condensation and the hammering on the cylinder cover was so great that we were obliged to reduce speed and drain the cylinder. The engine-room filled with steam. All the reservists ran off, squealing like pigs. With the old Pamir men we patched it all up and the next day it was the tubes of boiler 3 which began to blow. That’s the old one which was in urgent need of repair. The cattle-dealer, who was on duty at the feed pump, did not know where the cocks of the tanks were. When one had emptied itself he simply let it go. The gauge fell to zero and you can imagine the explosion. We drew the fire under one boiler and after that could barely make seven knots. In the Bay of Biscay we caught it proper. Two of the carriers and the bill-poster came out of the bunkers half dead, spitting blood and coal-dust by the quart, so now there was no way of getting the coal on the fire. Fourgues slowed to five knots. Our firemen were simply unable to stoke. It was more than they could manage, and at every shovelful they fell down, sending the fuel everywhere except into the mouth of the furnace.

With such a crew Fourgues was afraid the trip would take a month, and that we should run short of provisions and coal. So he put in at the port of —— and had a pretty cold reception. In the first place, it was Sunday and they wanted to know why he came bothering people then instead of on a week-day. He must have talked to them like a father, but I was unfortunately not there to hear. They gave him permission to get the provisions, but as for coal, search me!

“What!” says he, “you have heaps there! Can’t you give me half of one heap?”

“Impossible. What you see there is not to be touched. It is the mobilization reserve.”

“Great Scott! We are not merely mobilized, we are at war!”

“Possibly, but this is stock belonging to the mobilization—which means that it can’t be touched.”

There was no way out of it. But of what use is coal which is there for war, but which cannot be given out in time of war? The Pamir sailed after eight hours in port. We got provisions. Fourgues telegraphed to the office for money to be sent to Morocco. We were stony-broke, and would have to eat down there and pay for coal and get water and everything.

The rest of the passage was completed somehow or other at between five and six knots. The grease ran short, the bearings got hot, the bilgepump got out of order, and there were three feet of water under the planks of the stoke-hole. You can imagine the stink! Really, Muriac had points; he would never let any one put a nose into his shop, but he made things work! As for me, I give it up. Between bridge and engine-room—it was enough to drive a man crazy! Blangy was a lucky devil! By this time he must be on a really-and-truly ship with a full complement, officers and men. I wonder why it was he instead of me who went. We belong to the same year; only he gave his certificate to the officer at H—— first and was already packed up when I handed in mine. We’re in for a nice time, my boy, but much water will pass under the Pamir before they give us any officers.

We reached Morocco the day before yesterday. How did we get into the harbour? Ask Fourgues! We didn’t get the charts at H—— after all, and had nothing but the track-chart of the Atlantic, where the coast of Morocco occupies about half an inch. The bottom is bad, the coast is flat. We spent a day and a night wandering around in sight of beaches with three cacti and a palm-tree. Fourgues didn’t want to make the wrong port and at a distance they all looked alike. Quite impossible to get our bearings—clouds or fog all the time. Fortunately we came upon an American who signalled our position to us and the route to follow. And that’s how the Pamir got in.

In port everybody had skipped to France by the last boat. There was one shore officer, one chief petty officer, and no one else. They asked us what the deuce we had come for and if we had any munitions.

“Munitions!” cried Fourgues. “Five thousand bales of cotton, boilers shaken to pieces, nothing more to eat, some scrapings of coal, and no cash in the locker.”

“What the devil are you doing in Morocco then?”

“I was sent here from H—— and they said there would be orders here for the Pamir.”

“First we’ve heard of it. Never mind! Wait a bit and we’ll find something for you to do.”

And that’s why, old fellow, I write you from Morocco. We are waiting for the orders which have been requested from Paris, Rabat, and Tangier. Nothing comes. Fourgues will never recover his temper again. Our cotton had begun to heat, for it is warm here. Half the reservists are on their backs—diarrhœa, gastric troubles, general breakdown. You ought to hear them. Impossible to go anywhere or to unload, for we were told to be ready to start at two hours’ notice. As for me, I slept for nearly thirty-six—I had had my share! Fourgues is very nice to me. He takes it out on the reservists, and lor’! he does talk to them! At bottom he is right. All those fellows thought they were going to have an easy time and they need to be jacked up.

Consider yourself in luck, my son, to get such an epistle from me. Fact is, I’m Fed Up and I want to know what has become of you and the fellows. A ship from the south is passing to-morrow and I shall send this at a venture. I address it c/o your people, hoping they will see that it reaches you. Shall we write to each other once a month as before? I will try to. Shake, old man!

Port of K——,
Mediterranean,
October 5, 1914.

Dear old Thing,

And so you too were taken from your ship, like Blangy! (By the way, I have received nothing from him, not even a card. I suppose his laziness has got the better of him again.) All the same, I wish I might see you on your battleship, in a double-turret, on the lookout for twelve hours out of the twenty-four—How fed up you must be, poor old dear. I remember you telling me in New Orleans how you were soon going to command a Chilian sailing-vessel—“And tack about here and let out the sheets there!” I can still hear you. And now you are a gunner! They must need excellent observers on your battleships and I remember that with the sextant and the table of logarithms you used to beat us all to a frazzle. Position found within half-a-mile in twelve minutes—that was your style! Tut, tut, and so you mayn’t smoke your pipe. Never mind! As a hooker, the battleship Auvergne is right there—the very latest thing! I saw her launched. You ought to have nothing to complain of, and one of these fine days you will drop a few of the best “eggs” on the Austro-Boches at Pola or Cattaro. You won’t miss them, will you, like the Goeben and the Breslau? Taking it all in all, I’ve no sympathy for you.

As to the Pamir, they let her play bumpety-bump on the bottom for ten days there in Morocco. We rolled from one side to the other, notwithstanding our five thousand bales of cotton. I wouldn’t have believed there could be so much swell on that damned coast. It’s a nice place for loading! Try it! You have to look smart or bang goes your tackle, your derrick, and the whole caboodle, and get your load in your face. The most annoying part of it is that when there isn’t a cloud nor so much as a breath of breeze, you still get rollers and rollers, high as houses, from the sea. Furniture, dishes, books—down comes everything. In dead calms you would think you were in a Malay Straits monsoon.

They had no idea what to do with us down there. Fourgues would not set foot on land again, he was so riled at being “to Hell and gone” with a lot of blacks while others were working in France. And what a song they made about letting us have coal! There was a German ship, a great hulk of the Woermann line, in the roads, which had been stuck ever since the mobilization, hold and bunkers full of coal. All that was necessary was to take it! Oh, dear, no! Mustn’t touch the Boche even for a painter or a tarpaulin! The Boche is sacrosanct! This ship carried bananas and peanuts. All had rotted on the spot and you could smell them two miles away.

All the same, Fourgues kicked up such a row about the coal that they gave him some. We hadn’t enough to get as far as Gib.! We took some from the dock, from a heap intended for the Expeditionary Corps. You can imagine all the forms we had to fill up, and besides, they counted the sacks—just enough to get us to our destination. If the Pamir had taken one more day, it would have stopped dead like a sailing ship on the Equator.

Finally, one day, we were told to hook it right there for Oran, to transport Algerian troops. At the last moment a counter-order! Two days later, order to leave for Dakar and to put ourselves at the disposal of the Navy down there. We had weighed anchor, but not yet stowed it when they signalled us to let go again where we were. Five days passed. No news, no letters from home. We got down in the mouth. Fourgues stayed in his cabin, telling fortunes with his cards, swearing like a trooper. I gave lectures to the reservists on drain-pipes and valves. Muriac would have been amused to hear me explaining the way things worked. The rest of the time I played the mandolin, but enthusiasm was lacking, and, moreover, a good deal would have been necessary to keep up the strumming, when you had to clutch the wall every ten beats to keep from taking a toss when it rolled. Finally I played lying down! One fine morning they ordered us to get under way in a hurry and sail for T——, twenty miles to the north, to transport a tribe of Germans driven out of Morocco. Dirty work, but we were glad to be moving. My Gawd, what a stinking anchorage T—— is,—straight coast, open roadstead, no anchor-hold, a swell and a pebbly bar! Lovely! We are beginning to learn what rolling ninety degrees means.

On land there were about fifty Boches with all their goods and chattles—furniture, pianos, enormous trunks, a regular migration. The Germans do very well in Morocco. They have all passed the military age, for it is so written in their papers—the youngest was fifty. You who are a physiognomist would have put him down at thirty-five. The authorities ordered us to treat them with respect in accordance with a section in the International Law, and to give them accommodation, not as prisoners, but as passengers “under supervision.” Fourgues, who hates underhand dealing, said that he was not going to inconvenience the crew for the Boches and that he should put them on deck. Then he was told to construct wooden shelters on the deck, for dormitories and cabins. He said he had no wood for the purpose, so they sent him planks and new joists and some military carpenters, and in forty-eight hours the entire deck from the funnel to the stern was covered over with a fine hutment. We looked like one of those wash-houses on the Seine.

But, Lor’ love you! that wasn’t all! There was the furniture of these gentlemen, enough to fill a train, and they did not want it broken. Fourgues had planned to pile it forward and then lash it above the main hatch.

“You see, my boy,” he said to me, pulling his goatee, “there won’t be much left of their gadgets if we get a good sou’-wester in our backs. However, they can make matches with the remains.”

Unfortunately, in the first batch there was a piano. We slung and hoisted it with tackle, and in spite of the swell it came aboard pretty well and was just over the hatch. But as it began to descend, blowed if the cable didn’t foul the winch and stop short, our piano in the air. Three huge rollers came along, and everybody hung on to keep from taking a toss. The piano swung once, then once again, and then bang on to the port railing. The lid and cover flew off. Bang to starboard! The piano veered, the black and white keys chased each other over the deck, the strings snapped one after the other like a machine-gun, and the whole show smashed up. It looked like a burst spring mattress. Fourgues was overcome with that laugh of his which makes his tummy shake, and turned as red as a tomato. As for me, I was laughing so much I could hardly stand up, and the crew howled for joy. But the owner, a Boche in spectacles, raised the deuce. He fired broadsides of insults at us, but fortunately he spoke in his own disgusting language, for Fourgues was beginning to lose his hair and would have chucked him overboard without hesitation if he had understood a single word. It was just before the Marne and the Boches were jeering at us to their hearts’ content. This particular one went on land shaking his fist. We dumped what remained of the piano into the sea and loaded the rest of the furniture. But the next day we received an order to put all their stuff in the hold. A little tin-pot officer of sorts came aboard to announce this to Fourgues. He was well received:

“I am loaded to the hatches with cotton and I won’t unload a single bale. Even if you bring me a written order, I forbid my men to touch it without the order of my owner. I can’t keep you from unloading cotton, but you will have to provide the men.”

So a gang from land came and cleared half the hold. I wonder what in the world they did with it! We stowed the stuff as well as we could. To be sure, several chairs and gladstone bags went overboard, but nobody fished them up again. The Boches asked—but they did not ask Fourgues—to be given some bales of cotton for mattresses. So during the entire voyage they slept like pigs in clover while we continued to enjoy the Company’s usual board and lodging.

On the whole, we got on fairly well with the Huns. They tried to swank at the first meal. One of them, a genuine old one, had the face to go on the bridge afterwards and tell Fourgues that there wasn’t anything to eat, that Germans had to have beer instead of water, and that all these from Hamburg and Leipzig and elsewhere were gentleman of rank who had helped France conquer Morocco and had colonized there because France lacked the ability to do so and that they intended to be treated with respect. It was worth paying for a seat to see Fourgues during this little address. He put his hands in his pockets in order not to pitch the man of beer overboard. When the other had finished, Fourgues answered in his little calm voice, the one he uses, you know, when he is in such a rage that he is absolutely expressionless:

“The first person, you or another, who makes any complaint I shall put into the hold with the furniture. If you don’t like the food of the crew, you are not obliged to eat it. I forbid any of you speak to me. This officer is to look after you. Get to H—— off the bridge!”

They were quite subdued and we heard no more from them. They attended to their little affairs in their wooden stable and they slept. Easy enough to manage, these folks, when you put the wind up them. The old man would ask me politely when they wanted anything:

“Could you add a little sugar to the coffee? Could you sell us some matches?”

The latter was in order to start conversation, for always afterwards he would ask me if the Pamir was surely going back to France.

“Why do you wish to know?”

“Just because! Honestly, you aren’t going to a neutral port, are you?”

“No, we are bound for France.”

“And where?”

“If you know the country, you will recognize it.”

“All right, and I may tell my friends that we are not going to a neutral country?”

After the fifth or sixth time I told Fourgues about this.

“You bet!” he said; “all these humbugs are of military age. If we landed them in Spain they would have to hurry over and take a taste of our 75’s. They prefer a season in France snugly interned. They know we are much too stupid to hurt them.”

Fourgues was right. When I said as much to the old Boche, he smiled without answering. We landed them at —— and they have gone to hang themselves somewhere else. And whew! but their quarters were filthy! We had to swab and holystone for two days and it still smells.

You can be sure that the owner arrived by the first train. He was beginning to ask himself what had become of the Pamir and he doesn’t at all like losing money. His first interview with Fourgues was a little stormy. He didn’t quite dare reproach him for having turned about before Liverpool because that would have been a little bit too thick, but he was a little liverish all the same.

“You might just as well have gone on to your destination. Two days more or less isn’t anything.”

“It wouldn’t have happened,” said Fourgues, “if the propeller shaft hadn’t broken in mid-Atlantic. Muriac got us out of that splendidly, but with all respect to you, the whole engine is falling to pieces.”

“Anyway,” said the other, “you have your five thousand bales of cotton.”

“Five thousand! Minus fifteen hundred which are high and dry in Morocco!”

Well, sir, that hurt! He completely lost his hair. It had to be explained ten times, with the little tin-pot officer’s written order and all the rest of the red tape.

“Fifteen hundred bales of cotton gone! Fifteen hundred bales of cotton gone!” He kept repeating it over and over.

Then Fourgues, who had had all he could stand ever since Morocco, put it to him straight and told him to his face that if he didn’t like the way things had been run, he could hand the Pamir and her engine and her cotton over to some one else, and that without officers or crew it was pretty rough to be blamed. The owner was scared. He slapped the Old Man on the back and said:

“We’ll square all that, my good friend. Don’t get excited. It’s all right—everything I said was from the shareholders’ point of view. I am going to see the Admiral, and since you’re O.K. with your papers the Government will look after everything and we’ll try to have the Pamir chartered or some other arrangement made.”

He went away as sweet as honey, but I know what that means—somebody’ll have to pay heavily for it. He must have moved heaven and earth, for the next day a post-captain came on board to ask Fourgues how much coal he could take.

“Three thousand tons!”

“The Government engages you to carry coal to the navy. Lighters will come alongside at noon and you are to load at once.”

“And where shall I put it? I have one hold full and the other half full of cotton.”

Then the captain roared like a bull and said that he had been disturbed for nothing and that he didn’t know where to put the cotton, and that Fourgues might just as well have put it all ashore in Morocco, and that there wasn’t any sense in a boat that was neither full nor empty. They don’t mince their words in the Navy when they are talking to the Merchant Service. But Fourgues took it with a good grace because he wanted to get down to Orange and so he didn’t care. Moreover, he knew the owner could arrange it all with the authorities much better than he. No time was lost. The owner returned the next day and said that after consultation it had been agreed that the forward hold was to be emptied and loaded with fifteen hundred tons of special coal for torpedo-boats, but that the cotton should be left aft. After having supplied the Fleet, the Pamir would go to England and unload her cotton at Liverpool in order that all might not be lost, and then get more coal at Cardiff and go again to the Fleet.

“In this way my interests and those of the Government are equally protected. I sell only half my cotton and you get a load of coal at Cardiff at a cheap rate.”

I should like very much to know how much he made them pay for our stroll to Morocco and the fifteen hundred bales of cotton that were left behind and the chartering of the Pamir. He can’t have lost much by it because he went away very sprightly after authorizing Fourgues to go to Orange. So I am here alone with ship, engine, loading, and everything. As for La Rochelle, it’s all up. The coal is due to-morrow at 4 a.m.

Fourgues has just gone and I am in charge. There had to be a war for me to get a command! Well, perhaps I shall see you on your Auvergne down there and we’ll swap yarns. So long, old man.

Cardiff,
November 15, 1914.

Dear old Man,

Will you believe that I almost saw your battleship? It was just as we entered the Adriatic south of Leuca. At dawn I was taking the watch and I saw some smoke in the north—the kind that only warships kick up. Afterwards I saw the masts and smokestacks of three big ships which were going along line ahead. Fourgues thought it was a division of the big fellows bound for Malta to coal. He is pretty smart—for at Liverpool I received your letter dated in Malta five days after this encounter. I will speak of your letter later, but first let me tell you of affairs on the Pamir.

I thought we should never be done loading coal at K——. Fifteen hundred tons isn’t very much. In England or America it wouldn’t have taken more than a morning. There you are made fast to a wharf, the waggons come, you capsize them into the hold, and when one train is empty another pulls up.

At K—— it took three full days. We put it in with a teaspoon, as it were. In the first place, they tied us to a buoy out in the very middle of the harbour and the lighters came now and then in a sort of happy-go-lucky fashion. They had gangs on board of the kind that doesn’t get blistered, who stuffed the coal into sacks with shovels and then hove them with a windlass, ten at a time. There were other men in the hold who unhooked the sacks, emptied them by shaking them out, hung them on the hook and sent them out again. While the emptying was going on the windlass kept on running just the same. I understand now why coal costs the Navy so much!

That was not all. The port told us that we were to carry coal in briquettes especially for torpedo-boats, so of course I expected briquettes. Not at all! Ten lighters arrived loaded with lump coal. I say lump coal, but I might more correctly call it dust. It must have been there for several years, rotting in the yard. I shouted to the captain of the tug that there had been a mistake and that his dust must be for some other boat.

He asks me if I am the Pamir. “Looks like it,” I said, “can’t you read the name?” Then he answered that his written instructions were for the Pamir. He added that the briquettes would arrive later.

The moment there is a written instruction I go ahead: briquettes or coal-dust, they’re all cargo! It took two days for a thousand tons and the foreman of the gang thought that was going fast! What would he catch from the owner, I wonder, if the Pamir had to pay two days’ harbour dues for four shovelfuls of coal?

“But,” I asked, “isn’t this coal for the torpedo-boats and isn’t it true that they use nothing but briquettes?”

“You’re sure to find cruisers and warships down there. They burn anything. And anyway, these ten lighters were ready and we had to send you a thousand tons, so we took the first thing at hand.”

They don’t worry about things at K——, believe me! The briquettes arrived the third day and it was necessary to flatten out the coal-dust, which was piled up like a sugar-loaf, so that they should not tumble to the bottom of the hold. We mustn’t break them, said the foreman, because that spoilt them. But only the tops of the lighters were stowed, shipshape, with whole briquettes. (It was splendid coal, too, Grand-Combe Lens, the very pick of the basket.) But after two or three layers there was nothing but leavings, pieces as big as your fist, and in the bottom—mud—which we had to take just the same because the order was to send the lighters back well scraped out. If everybody scrapes them why should there be any mud? It will be nice in the furnaces of the torpedo-boats! Do you remember the cases of oranges we bought at Carthagena: the top layers A1 Lloyds, the bottom rotten? So it was with their coal.

Fourgues came at seven that evening and we left at eight. Now he don’t care a damn about anything. He saw his people at Orange and found everything all right and brought back with him a lot of macaroons they make at Aix, preserves from Apt, and a cask of extra brandy. He has not lost his hair once during the whole voyage, and what is more, he has promised me on his word of honour that it will be my turn next time. With all his faults he is not a liar! In three or four months I shall make a trip home and perhaps I shall have been able to save enough to get married. We shall see.

Things are going better all the same. At K—— the Navy gave us a reservist chief quartermaster. He is the owner of boats on the Seine and caught on quickly. As far as Liverpool we divided the watch among the three of us and so could breathe. During the trip I taught the tram-driver the rules of navigation, lights, whistles, etc. From Liverpool to Cardiff he took the watch under Fourgues’ supervision. He’s fairly on the spot. He will take the watch by himself on the return trip and you can see your old chum beginning to revive.

At K—— there was an engineer who came to look at our broken shaft and repairs. He found it rather rustic (as he termed it) and had a new collar made for us, all polished and well-turned with a guard and friction band. It was a bit too fancy to be solid and has already started shaking loose. At the first dirty sea we get the two pieces of the shaft will begin to twist apart. Fortunately I have kept Muriac’s collars.

The Pamir was ordered to go to Anti-Paxo. She made her ten knots and arrived without too much trouble. The reservists are beginning to tumble to it. I forgot to say that the burst tubes of boiler 3 have been changed. It isn’t perfect, but if we don’t drive her too hard we can wait awhile for new tubes. We arrived at Anti-Paxo at two o’clock in the morning. Why do they make us sail with all lights on when the ships of war have all lights out? We are game for the Huns as much as they, and you can’t tell what you may blunder into. During the last night, with the sky so overcast that you couldn’t see the bows, suddenly I smelt smoke right in my face, on the starboard bow. Well, old man, it was one of your thirty-six funnel cruisers which had just cut across our course a cable’s length ahead and which sent its bloomin’ cinders into my eyes. I hadn’t seen a thing! You could have knocked me flat! Really, they might show a light when they are going to play stunts like that. I know that their officers watch, but just the same, one of these days there’ll be a smash, my boy.

Before Anti-Paxo a T.B.D. came down on us full speed. We hoisted our signal. She stopped to port side ten yards away. The commander looked furious.

“Are you the Pamir? You ought to have gone to Fano.”

“At K——,” answered Fourgues, “they said Anti-Paxo!”

“It’s the Marguerite which should come to Anti-Paxo. We have been calling you all night.”

“But just look, sir, I have no wireless!”

“Yes, I quite see. All you hookers are alike! Well, come along, follow me. How much coal have you?”

“Fifteen hundred tons.”

“Good! You are to coal the cruiser Lamartine, there behind the point.”

“Yes, but the top of my hold has briquettes for torpedo-boats!”

This did nothing to soothe the commander’s feelings. He reflected awhile and then swore.

“Well, so much the worse. The Lamartine has been waiting since yesterday and she has to sail north to-day. She’ll take your briquettes and to-morrow you can give your lump coal to some other ship.”

“All right,” said Fourgues.

And off we go to hail Lamartine which was waiting below the promontory, drifting without having cast even the smallest anchor.

At a thousand yards they made us stop because an officer from the ship was coming aboard in a launch to help us to handle her. They might just as well have kept him. We have only one screw, not three like a cruiser, and the Pamir, with three thousand tons in her hold, won’t turn like a teetotum. The officer wanted to show us what to do. Fourgues began by cursing aloud and then bethought himself that in time of war the Merchant Service must contain itself. When he saw that the damage would not be serious, he let the officer go ahead.

“Go ahead! Astern! Hard a-starboard! But your ship doesn’t answer the helm! She’s broadside on! Astern! Astern! My God—”

Bump! You bet she stopped, the old Pamir! It was lucky the Lamartine was armoured! Otherwise we should have walked right into her as far as the steps of the masts! Anyway, we rammed her. We broke the two first hawsers, new steel ones, and we scraped her a little. Ah, oh, my! what gadgets you do have sticking out all over your ships—turrets, guns, catheads, bridges!

The Pamir took the whole bump with her starboard lifeboat which tumbled between us and cracked like a nut. This deadened the shock somewhat, but our davits were twisted and we can’t hang another lifeboat up there in a hurry.

The cruiser began to load her coal at seven in the morning and by three in the afternoon, including the lunch interval, had swallowed her thousand tons, briquettes first, lumps next. How the crew did it I can’t think. Some crew, eh? Just think, they had been thirty days at sea and yet they grubbed that out in seven hours! If you have that kind on the Auvergne you can be proud of them. What I want to know is if your naval constructors spend their time trying to make it more difficult for the coal to be taken aboard? They certainly never could have handled briquettes themselves or they would not have made it necessary to go about it as if one were trying to get furniture into a house through the chimney.

I tried to follow the course of a load of coal from the hold of the Pamir into the hold of the Lamartine, but it was like trying to find the exit of the maze at the Crystal Palace—only there it was dirtier!

And then, do you trail your coal around on the Auvergne in hampers, like those in which the negroes of the Antilles carry bananas? It is like trying to empty the Mississippi with a cocktail straw. The hampers break—this breaks the backs of the men—and as for dust...! The English and the Germans do things better than this, it must be admitted. With their Temperly the coal goes up a sort of lift and their ways of getting into the hold are less outlandish. I may be wrong, you’ll put me wise anyway.

Lamartine sent us to anchor for the night on a submerged reef, saying that another cruiser would come on the following day to take what was left. Before you could say “Jack Robinson” she was gone in the mist. Fourgues lost no time about anchoring, very glad to draw breath and smoke a pipe in peace.

We cleaned up and he had a lot of brandy sent to the bridge; we put it in our coffee to get the coal out of our mouths, and then we yarned till supper. The fog lifted for the sunset and we were both struck dumb. You are lucky to be seeing that every evening! Fourgues wanted to swank and say that in the Rhone Valley and at Marseilles, when the mistral’s blowing, the sunsets are better than that. All brag! As for me, I know this beats the Antilles and the Gulf of Bengal to a frazzle. There was not more light and not so many bright colours, but it was like velvet. You must be grateful to me for telling you all about it when you have seen it every night for three months! But I should be happy to go back there again to look at those sunsets while I think of home.

The next morning we expected a cruiser for our lump coal. Instead there arrived a flotilla of destroyers who hooked themselves on all round the Pamir. It was neatly done—a cable here and a fender there, and there they were, like good children, all fast, lashed for’ard and aft. The Commodore boarded us and asked for Fourgues. He couldn’t have had his boots off for a long time nor washed either. His beard was full of cinders, his eyes red. When he found out that the Lamartine had taken the special coal and that there was nothing for him but coal in bulk, he fairly let go:

“This is the third time! It fouls my gratings and it smokes like hell! And they want us to make twenty-five knots with that dirt!”

But he had to get off at noon in order to go on patrol duty in the evening—I forget where—and so he took the coal. Those fellows on the destroyers, I pity them even more than the ones on the cruisers. They haven’t room to swing a cat, and they must ship some awful seas!

We had a hundred tons of coal left when the six of them had finished. Fourgues would have liked very much to return empty, for there’s no sense in carrying freight home again. But no ship would coal there for five days, and as it was hardly worth while for the Pamir to go north with so little, the Commander-in-Chief ordered us by wireless (received by the Commodore) to proceed to our destination.

“You see, my boy,” said Fourgues, “the cruisers took the coal intended for the destroyers and the destroyers the coal for the cruisers. Such is life!”

The destroyers gone, we filled our forward ballast-tanks, for you can imagine how our twenty-five hundred bales of cotton weighed us down by the stern, and got under steam for Liverpool. It was a regular joy-ride. Fourgues had no fear of running short of coal with the hundred tons we were carrying gratis, and there were three of us for the watch, including the Johnny of the Paris boats, who, by the way, has a little fund of stories that leave Fourgues’ a long way behind.

At Liverpool the pilot delivered a telegram from the owner, who said that according to agreement with the consignee, we must hand our cotton over to the Karl Kristian, a big Norwegian cargo-boat, moored near Birkenhead. When we were able to make fast to her, can you guess what the captain said to Fourgues? Guess again, my son! That the Karl Kristian was going to carry the twenty-five hundred bales with four thousand more to Copenhagen! You bet that stuff’s going to stay in Denmark! This was the first time Fourgues lost his hair since K——, and he said that if he had known he would have pitched it all overboard in Morocco and carried furniture for a hundred thousand Boches, rather than hand over to them material with which to furnish shells for a whole Army Corps. You must have read the articles of the Hague Conference, old man, on your battleship, so if you can tell why it is forbidden to sell coal to the Boches and why cotton is not contraband of war, you will do both Fourgues and me a favour. If the Germans were in our place on the sea and we in theirs, I think an embargo on cotton would not have been so long delayed.

The Pamir soon hooked it from Birkenhead. During the day the Karl Kristian scraped out our twenty-five hundred bales, and Fourgues profited by the occasion to have the builder’s diver—the Pamir was built there—take a squint at our screw, which did not seem to be turning true. It was then we learned that a good chunk of metal from the propeller was lying in the Atlantic, as well as three nuts broken off from the nave. Fourgues would have liked to have it repaired then and there, but the people at the yard told him that they were overrun because the Admiralty was rushing construction, and that if the Pamir could go as far as Cardiff, we should find another screw at their branch establishment and some one to mount it. As it is only a short trip we left that evening in ballast, and this morning they had her down by the bows and installed a raft under the propeller, just at water-level. To-morrow they will be through. We shall load up coal and get off again.

As there was nothing to do while this work was going on, Fourgues gave shore-leave to the whole bunch, who did not need to be told twice, and invited me to dinner at the Welsh Lino! It bucked us up to drink cool beer and eat fresh bread. As we were in such a good temper, I read him your letter from Malta which I had had in my pocket ever since Liverpool. I hope you don’t mind. Anyway, he said:

“They are lucky on the Auvergne. With a young chap like that on the bridge the commander ought to be able to sleep easy.”

Believe me, it made him sit up to learn that you watch in a turret and that when you set foot on the bridge you cease to call your soul your own! All that you wrote interested him greatly. Fourgues has an abrupt manner, appears rather off-hand, and talks little except to swear; but when he really unbosoms, there is nothing to do but listen, for I have observed that sooner or later you find he was in the right.

“Your friend’s letter is not at all bad,” he said when I had finished. “He is interested in what he is doing and there’s nothing else worth while in the world, except home and family. But he seems to me to believe that the world was created on the Auvergne. That’s a way they have. And he believes in nothing but guns and dreams of nothing but the damage they’ll do. Very good, but we’ve still got to see if there’s going to be nothing but guns in this war at sea! By the way things are going, I have a sort of idea the Germans don’t figure it that way. As for the Austrians! Well, we shall see. Come on, Sonnie, let’s play English billiards and have a drink of whiskey. That’ll stretch our fingers and legs a bit. You can tell me what you think of the letter and see if we agree.”

You know I’m a mug at billiards, especially on those enormous English billiard-tables. Fourgues gave me a hundred points in five hundred and won in seven breaks. I stood around and watched him do it and never saw him look so pleased. I tried to get in a few words about your letter, but he held the floor the entire time. I can’t tell you all he said, for it lasted an hour, but he asked a lot of questions and as I could not answer them—“Ask your gunner,” he would say, “this and that and the other,” chalking his cue.

And so, old man, I obey, and you may answer direct to Fourgues if you wish. I shan’t be jealous and it will please him.

“One of two things,” he said—“either the Navy wants to fight the Austrians or it don’t. If it wants to, why blockade the Strait of Otranto? If you want to shoot a rabbit, you let him come out of his hole first, then you get between the hole and the rabbit and then you fire! But you don’t get in front of the hole in the first place or he won’t come out. I don’t know where the Austrians are—at Pola or Cattaro or somewhere else—but I know they’re not going to come out with our Navy parading up and down in front of them, in strength four to one. It would be better if we were to stay in some port near by, with only one or two ships in the Strait—which is not so broad—and let them make a sortie if they want to and then fall on them.

“The thing would be decided in an hour and the blockade would be over. Instead of that, we wear out our ships and our men while the Austrians remain at home, keeping their engines in A1 condition and sweating at target-practice so as to be right on the spot when they choose to move.

“And what good does it do to go up and down the Adriatic in full war-paint? Everybody knows that nowadays warships can’t get near an enemy coast because of the mines. The commander of the Lamartine told me the other day that they’re not allowed to go in beyond the 55 fathom line and that means from ten or twenty or thirty miles out to sea. They certainly won’t bombard the Austrian arsenals and invade Austria from that distance. All they’ll get will be a floating mine or a torpedo from a submarine. I can’t see any other result. Fact is, with the apparent intention of fighting, they all seem to me to be doing their utmost not to get any. What’s more, if you have read the English papers, you can see that it’s the same over there. Well, who lives learns. Write all that to your friend with a greeting from me and ask him what they think about it on the Auvergne and the other ships. Perhaps all this is only the imagining of an old duffer who hasn’t worried around books on tactics, but it ought not to be very far from the truth.”

Fourgues said a lot more, but this is enough for to-day. To-morrow three thousand tons of coal and off by night! If we have no new instructions we go back to coal the Fleet. But perhaps a telegram will come during the day. Good-bye, old man. I’m going up to play the mandolin on the deck and you may bet I shan’t be thinking of you!

Alexandria,
February 12.

Dear old Chap,

I’m sorry I haven’t written for so long, even at New Year. You know that I’ve thought of you, but honestly, I’ve not had time to call my soul my own! If I’m not mistaken my last letter was from Cardiff and we were expecting to leave for the Strait of Otranto. But we got a counter-order. The English fleet need a lot of coalers in the North Sea and is jolly short of them. At the beginning of the war they took for their motto “Business as usual,” and the Bulls let the coaling ships go about their regular jobs so as not to disturb “business.” But as the war kept dragging on, they could no longer guarantee supplies everywhere, so, in short, the Pamir was sent to Senegal, Togoland, and the Cameroons, where there is a Franco-British squadron which needed coal.

At first everything went well, but off Cape Finistère we ran into a squall. The Pamir was loaded to the very brim and you should have seen her! The decks were awash for thirty-six hours. The trouble was that the shaft was up to its old tricks, and we saw that the collar repaired at K—— was going to leave us in the lurch in the middle of the gale. Fourgues reduced speed as much as he could without risk of broaching and made for Cadiz to have the collars manufactured by Muriac put in place again. The repairs didn’t go at all smoothly because my men don’t understand a thing about it and I hardly more. We profited by the occasion to lay in water and provisions. Really, it’s not amusing to be a Frenchman in Spain at present. They looked at us out of the corners of their eyes and laughed behind our backs. The Boches have a good footing there, their Government supports them, while Fourgues was pretty badly received. And then all the French had been recalled at the mobilization—there is no one left to represent us. All our affairs there are going to the dogs. The Boches are profiting by this. They are getting ready for the war after the war, seriously. And don’t think for a minute that they all stay there! There are big vessels full of Germans sailing from Barcelona and Cadiz, which go to neutral countries and from there to Germany. We could make a big sweep if we went after them. I hope you’ll tell me if any have been taken. You ought to know. I don’t know much. I have my hands full on board and the papers talk such rot, and then, once you have left land you think of other things. But you only have to walk along the docks there to see the boats sailing with the Boches. With a Secret Service Agent on the spot, France could know the hour and the day of sailing and a warship would bag them as they left Spanish waters.

After that the Pamir went south as far as Dakar. We did the whole coast, Gorée, Sierra Leone, Porto Novo—leaving coal more or less everywhere, sometimes on a gunboat, sometimes on a cruiser or at a dock. It reminded me of the old trading voyages when they made little trips from port to port to unload three tons and take on a hundred hogsheads. Only, this time, nothing doing for ordinary merchandise! There were bales and bales, clusters of bananas and ivory for the asking everywhere, more than I can tell, waiting to be shipped. Fourgues is devoured with despair to see all that mouldering when the Pamir has room enough to clean up the entire coast. But he asked in vain. He was refused everywhere because he is on Government service, so we returned empty. With the bananas alone we could have paid for our return voyage. All that stuff will go to a neutral port and thence I jolly well know where!

We saw a good many people down there who asked for news and details. Fourgues’ preserves and brandy were all used up because he invited so many of the poor devils who were homesick. There are some who have had three or four years in Africa and it was their turn to come home. Now they’ve got to stay on. It seems that things are going well and that Togoland and the Cameroons will not take long. But the Boches had been getting ready long ago, for away off down in the bush, guns and machine-guns of the latest type were found and heaps of ammunition. In spite of this, everybody said that the country would soon be cleared, which will make two fine colonies the less for them. The English got a number of their boats, and the Naval officers with whom we talked said that that would make a good sum in prize-money. When we told them that with us since the war, prize-money has been suppressed, and allowances and so forth, they wouldn’t believe us. As they said, the labourer is worthy of his hire, and one is more apt to hustle if there is some sort of recompense ahead. There was even one who said that we were mugs and that we should be obliged to go back to it. Fourgues wanted to jump on him, but was only half-hearted about it, for he had already told me that he thought the same.

On going back to Dakar we were ordered to touch at Casablanca to await instructions. We thought it was going to be last August all over again, but not at all! There were two thousand tons of cereals waiting to be taken to Montenegro, which is starving. We brought it alongside in native boats called barcasses, like the furniture of the Boches, only we stowed it better! In the middle of December there is something like a swell. I spent my time saying, “That’s done it! That barcasse will capsize in the surf!”—and then it didn’t after all. They know the trick, those Arabs. Fourgues was glad to have a cargo and not to be returning in ballast. He was afraid, though, that they wouldn’t send us to Montenegro after all.

“You’ll see, my boy. They’ll make us unload all that and go back for coal.”

He doesn’t like coal because, he says, although it keeps the teeth white and is good for the stomach, you can’t have clean shirts and handkerchiefs with it. But we were sent to Oran to make up our cargo with shoes, blankets, and all sorts of clothing. They must be absolutely on their beam-ends in Montenegro.

Finally the Pamir spent several hours at Bizerta, taking in petrol for the Montenegrin army. Though we did not loaf around anywhere, all this took time, and at the worst time of the year, too. I could never have believed that the Mediterranean was so bad. It is worse than the Atlantic and the China Sea: rain or wind, wind or rain, and a choppy sea all the time. Fourgues takes it all in the day’s work and laughs at me:

“Eh, my boy! You see it’s a mistake to run down the South. The Mediterranean is not much bigger than a cup, but it takes a devilish clever fellow to go up and down it without striking a snag. Now look at that one—and that!”

I can understand why there should be waves as high as the funnel where they have space in which to pile up, but to find such waves in the Mediterranean, that beats me. You, old man, have some peace in your turret, but the bridge of the Pamir is seldom dry.

Our rendezvous was for ten miles west of Fano and the Pamir arrived about noon. From far off we asked ourselves what on earth was going to happen. We expected to see a destroyer or perhaps a cruiser, but not fifty or sixty of you! We could see the smoke thirty miles away, and all the time other boats kept coming along. It was the first time I had seen the Fleet out in full force, battleships, cruisers, and T.B.D.’s. I won’t deny it, the sight’s a staggerer! I looked for the Auvergne, but she wasn’t there. What were you doing? I was so interested watching the wigwagging, the flags, and all the pinnaces going from one ship to another, that I forgot to drop you a line during the half-hour we lay-to in the middle of the lot. I was asking myself what you were all doing there, dead-still and apparently idle, and it was only at the end that I saw the mail-boat which had been hidden by a big cruiser, and understood why there were so many small craft running around. Well, your Admiral isn’t afraid to stay there in broad daylight, all of you together, under the very noses of the Greeks.

As soon as we had stopped, a steam launch came for Fourgues and took him aboard the Admiral’s ship, where he didn’t stay fifteen minutes. When he came back, he ran up the ladder in a hurry.

“Full steam ahead at once, my boy—due North. Put her behind that destroyer while I read my orders.”

He went off to open his sealed envelope and I proceeded behind the destroyer all by myself, proud as could be in the midst of all that steel. Nevertheless, it was annoying not to have known that we should run up against the mail-boat. You can get along, old chap, but at home they will think I’ve been drowned, for they’ve been a month without a letter.

When Fourgues returned to the bridge I expected him to tell me about it, and I began:

“Well, Captain?”

“Carry on, my boy.”

He stood near the speed indicator, frowning and tapping on the rail. I could see that he was disturbed, but there was no use putting in my oar. I should only have caught it, whereas, as he has no one but me to talk to, it was all sure to come out before long.

He went down again and gave orders for doubling the watch—two men for’ard, one aft. Then he said that as we were going up and down the Adriatic again he and I should be watch-keepers with the others to support us except during meals, which we should continue to eat together, but in the chart-house. Afterwards he ruminated without uttering another syllable until dinner.

I kept my mouth shut, but I was beginning to be astonished to see Fourgues shutting up just at the moment when he was going to do something interesting. He is more apt to let rip. Finally he exploded:

“Well, anyway, we’d better talk things over. Say, kid, do you know what they asked me on that battleship?”

“Mum’s the word!” says I to myself, says I.

“Well, they asked me why I didn’t have wireless, and why I didn’t have a lookout on the masthead, and where were signal lights, and how was I going to communicate with them at night and with the destroyer, and why this and why that! Holy blazes! they have only to give the order! I want nothing better than to have the Pamir rigged with all the gadgets in creation and with new boilers and a whole shaft into the bargain! But think of it! To act as though they had caught me napping! I’m not a battleship! Well, then I turned in and asked one of them who was going to ask me another dam silly question—a little tin-pot Commander:

“‘And you? What are you lying-to here for? Asking for a torpedo?’

“He burst out cackling and called some others and they looked me over as though I were a queer beast. There was one who condescended to explain that submarines were for coast-defence and would never, never come down as far as Fano; that I really mustn’t get the wind up me—one could sail quite safely. Farther up, perhaps, it would be as well to keep one’s eyes open, but out to sea—what a joke! A bit thick that, to suggest I was afraid! I don’t know what I might have said to them, but the Admiral came:

“‘Oh, you’re the skipper of the Pamir going to Montenegro! You are luckier than I! But surely you aren’t afraid!’

“Damn it, I’d have answered him, but he went away without waiting for an answer, and as soon as they had given me my sealed orders I came right back. Here I know what I am doing and no one dares to give me lessons! Let them grant me wireless! I have asked the owner for it ten times if I’ve asked once, and every time he looks at me as though I were asking for the moon! Oh, yes—I forgot. On the gangway there was a little lieutenant. I asked him what I was to do if I saw a submarine—should I go after it with my fists? He too looked at me as though I were a freak and shrugged his shoulders and went back to laugh with the rest of them. Gorblime!”

It did Fourgues good to relieve his mind. He lit his pipe and swallowed a glass of rum—best Jamaica.

“Go to bed, Sonnie, and try to get some sleep till eight bells, for to-morrow you won’t get any to worry about! We are going to Antivari, to arrive at night and leave again the next morning and all the stuff has to be put ashore. Fortunately the nights are long. They’ll see what old man Fourgues is made of.”

It’s not really amusing running up the coast of Albania. There is about as much vegetation as on the back of my hand, and when the wind butts in from the mountains, it’s no laughing matter. There’s a wind there called the bora. Well, we got a smack from it that was enough to pull the masts out! I don’t know how the destroyer managed not to capsize. Every time we could see her between the waves she was heeling right over, on one beam or the other. As for the Pamir, she has had so much of that sort of thing that it doesn’t even take off any paint—she hasn’t any left!

By hugging the coast we arrived at Antivari the next day, the destroyer ahead showing the way. The wind fell, but still it wasn’t exactly fun, and there was not a light showing. Fourgues went in as though it were broad day, but really we could see neither the coast nor the wharf. You would have believed he was going into the Eure docks at Havre with one tug in front and another behind.

However, there was somebody on the wharf, Montenegrins who caught our ropes and belayed ’em pretty well. The Pamir was able to warp in and didn’t smash anything alongside. The natives leaped on board like devils. I suppose the weird jabbering meant that they wanted food, for as we got out the first bags of corn they fell on them and filled their pockets.

Nice night-job, that! Not allowed to show a light, not allowed to use the winch, not allowed to shout! Just pitch the stuff over on to the wharf without knowing where it will fall—so much the worse for any one who is underneath! Those ashore grabbed the stuff as well as they could and dragged it into the sheds—petrol, shoes, blankets, sacks of corn—over it went! We didn’t kill anyone, though Lord knows why not, nor did the Austrian aviators who came at two o’clock in the morning and dropped four or five bombs which burst all around—excepting one which fell into our corn without going off and which Fourgues threw overboard as though it were a cigarette end. As soon as they heard the airplanes, all the natives ran like hares, and there was no getting them to come back. A nice lot, want food, but won’t work for it! The destroyer sent us some men, and although they must have longed for sleep after the dog’s life of these last few days, they dragged the things out as though they were doing it for themselves. They were certainly doing someone else’s dirty work! By five in the morning the hold was empty and scraped clean and the Pamir left without waiting for anything more. The destroyer, having received a wireless during the night, stayed behind, so she put out to patrol around the neighbourhood, and we went down the Adriatic without being convoyed. If a hydroplane with a rifle had fired on us we should have been prisoners, and wouldn’t that have looked pretty! Fourgues was cursing below his breath, saying that a ship of three thousand tons is worth taking and that France is not rich enough to cast them loose in enemy waters like that. And we had no orders, and Fourgues was wondering whether to return to Cardiff or go to Toulon, or what. In short, life on the bridge was far from amusing. As a climax, a crank started heating. We had to slow down to three knots and turn the hose on it. There was time for us to be sunk ten times over, for it took fifty hours to get back, with dirty weather and head winds.

Fourgues wanted to go in between Corfu and the coast to find still water and to anchor if the crank wouldn’t cool off; but just as we were turning into the north channel, a whole flotilla of torpedo-boats came along and signalled for us to keep outside. They shouted through the megaphone that French boats should not go into Greek waters. But the Pamir is not a war-vessel....

They talked on. It seems that the whole Navy believed the Pamir had been sunk or torpedoed and that they had been searching for us everywhere for twenty-four hours. The destroyer which was with us at Antivari had received orders to come back and try to find us, while the others went up. Our convoying T.B.D. started out at full speed and passed us without seeing us, of course, because we were hugging the coast for shelter, and was cursed like the deuce, by wireless, by the Commander-in-Chief, but Fourgues was annoyed, a little, to learn of it.

“Too bad! If they would give us wireless that sort of thing wouldn’t happen,” he concluded.

They were also looking for us because they wanted us to go to Alexandria, where we arrived the day before yesterday. We don’t yet know why, but I believe it is because of an expedition in the direction of Constantinople. Fourgues is rather pleased, for, he says, it will be amusing to anchor as a conqueror where he has anchored so many times with a lot of junk. I only hope it may be so! He spends his time now telling me about the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles where I have never been.

He says that with nerve the thing is possible—that we should take them by surprise and go right in, and then in three days the Turks would be done for. “Only,” he adds, “it isn’t enough to talk about going; you must go!”

Meanwhile we’re having a rest. The English are charming and they don’t worry at Alexandria. The crew are improving the opportunity! We’ve had a few broken heads, but Fourgues shuts his eyes because they have worked like dogs for three months and this is the first time there has been any chance of a beano.

I took the chance of writing some letters as you see. I wish I had some books. Since August I have been doing a lot of thinking, especially as Fourgues has made me see what a lot of things there are that I don’t know. Before, I never read anything but the papers, but now I need something more serious, if only to make conversation with him. Send me a list of books, old man, on nautical subjects and European history, and some classics too. I will buy them in France. If you aren’t sick at my having abandoned you for so long, ship me a parcel of books you’ve done with and don’t need any more. Here’s wishing you a happy New Year.

PART TWO

Newcastle,
England,
April 8, 1915.

Well, old man, we have just been through something special in the way of foul weather, up north of Scotland. You must wonder what we are doing up there, as I wrote from Egypt that the Pamir was going to transport men to the Dardanelles. As you shall see, it’s quite simple.

We remained at Alexandria just long enough to like it and to contract a few little habits—movies, bars, etc. Fourgues and I went to Cairo together and to the Pyramids. You have no idea how he can talk about all that. I don’t know where he was ever able to learn so much, and no hot air, you know, for I bought a guidebook afterwards to see if it was all true—the Pharaohs, the Turks, Bonaparte, and all that—and he had told it all just like the book. That reminds me, I want to thank you for the books you sent me. You are my father and my mother. I received them here the day before yesterday and I have begun with the maritime history of France. It is jolly interesting. I am not ashamed to confess to you that I don’t know much about it. But after what I have now read, it seems to me to be always the same story—frigates or battleships, sails or steam, you could say it was beginning all over again. Anyway, by degrees I will tell you what I think about it.

At Alexandria our crew spent all their savings in four days and painted the streets and pubs red. The police brought several back, but Fourgues wouldn’t jump on them.

“Leave them alone, my boy. Sailors aren’t archangels. Let the cops ship aboard the Pamir for three months and see if they drink soda water after even that little while. When our beggars haven’t a cent left, they’ll be quiet enough and we’ll haul ’em up taut.”

That’s the way with Fourgues. At sea he makes them leap with a rope’s end if things don’t move fast enough. But when there is nothing doing he let’s them go hell in their glory. I believe it’s the best way, for all the reservists have fallen into his ways, and there isn’t one who wants to leave the Pamir, although work there is devilish hard.

After eight days in Alexandria we were ordered to Port Said. It was because of a cargo-boat from Bombay, filled with Indian soldiers for the front. Its condensers had gone to blazes and as the men must go and as the boat was in for a fortnight of repairs, they took the old Pamir, being free, to push along the six hundred men. As far as comfort goes, it was pretty poor. When it comes to freight, the Pamir isn’t afraid of three thousand tons and even a little more crammed into the corners. But passengers! There is the deck and the hold, and you must make the best of that! Fourgues put two senior officers in each of the cabins of Blangy and Muriac and I don’t see how the four managed to exist. You know the cabins of the Pamir—they make splendid pigeon-holes! The other officers, the “subs” as the Bulls call them, we housed along with the non-commissioned officers, in the superstructure which served for the Boches last year. As for the rest, they were free to stuff themselves in anywhere, hold or deck, according to preference.

Fourgues and I hadn’t time to arrange anything for the poor devils. We were given only twenty-four hours’ notice and had to coal and revictual. Think of it! To take six hundred men when you’ve enough to feed thirty-five and not to know whether it is to be for ten or for twenty days, because no one could tell us whether they were going to Marseilles, to Havre, or to England! The shore authorities at Port Said told Fourgues that he would receive orders at sea by wireless. When he answered that he had no wireless, there was the usual palaver and they were polite to each other. Finally, they told him to call at Marseilles for instructions and that there they would tell him what to do. Fourgues profited by the incident to telegraph the owner and demand urgently that we be fitted with wireless because he had had enough of being called over the coals as though it were his fault. But all that is by the way.

We took from on board the Indian cargo-boat the entire provision of rice for six hundred men, as well as the officers’ provision of whiskey. The officers had with them cases of port wine and of sundry other drinks. It was lucky for them, for you know except for old brandy and rum, Fourgues doesn’t like to have us drink aboard. They had to have Fafa to make their cocktails and wait on them specially during the entire voyage.

The night we stayed in Port Said, Fourgues and I went to buy some eatables, preserves, jams, etc., with which to feed all those officers. The things were not easy to find, and whew—the prices! What enraged Fourgues the most was that we had to pay for everything in gold, but no one ever gave us anything but silver. As the same thing had happened in Alexandria, at Cairo, and everywhere we have been since the beginning of the war, he swears that it is another stroke of the Boches.

“You see, my boy, we pay in gold, and never set eyes on it again. Don’t worry! It isn’t lost for everybody! They have their agents everywhere. Our good money goes to Hun-land by way of Greece or Italy and with it they pay the neutrals for their victuals!”

Fourgues added some other things, but it is better not to tell you because you will imagine that I am grousing too much and you know I’m not made that way. The Pamir steered for Marseilles first. We had fairly good weather, we rolled and pitched a little, as we were a bit light, but it was enough to lay five hundred out of the six hundred Hindus on their backs. Almost all the rice is left, for they couldn’t eat a thing. It was better thus, for I don’t know what our cook would have done with six hundred of them to feed. He had no time to waste as it was, though it is easy to take care of Hindus—all you need is some rice and water. A dozen of them had brought flutes or drums, and they did not once stop playing from Port Said to Havre. They played in relays, two at a time, installing themselves just at the foot of the bridge so that those in the hold who were seasick could hear, and all the time, night and day, they beat the drum and played the flute. You have no idea what that Oriental music can be. At first it seemed as though they played the same notes all the time, but it’s not so at all. It comes and goes like a thought! When I had the watch at night sometimes I longed to sleep, listening to them, and then sometimes I wanted to cry. There were times when I wanted to tell them to shut up because it was too stupid to feel so confoundedly blue. And then it would seem as though I must have it and I listened after all. I’m talking rot, old chap.

At Marseilles we simply went in and out again. An officer of the English Mission came to tell us to go to Havre with our Hindus, but the senior officers, who had had enough of it in the pigeon-holes of Muriac and Blangy and who had finished their port and their whiskey the day before, asked to leave at once. As they were lords, or little tin gods of sorts they went without waiting and the “subs” took their places.

The Pamir went all around Spain and the Atlantic coast with the six hundred Hindus, who got seriously ill and arrived at Havre like rags. Fourgues said that it was just a little barbarous, the more so as nothing is really saved by the trip, for it will take a month at least before all those poor devils will be able to go to the front.

They were exhausted. Some of them almost died, they were bringing up blood. And as they were cold, bronchitis and chest complaints had set in. The only physician they had was Fourgues, and that’s all about it! He treated them with doses of rum in hot water, for our medicine chest had soon been emptied. Three of them died, which is not many, say the officers.

We buried them at sea with a weight at their feet to make them sink. All of us who were French felt pretty bad about it. But the others——. It’s plain that in India human life doesn’t count for much.

We were all glad to leave them at Havre. I wonder what use they’ll be at the front. If it came to being killed, I don’t believe they would hesitate, but when you have seen them shivering and crowding together under the melting snow of late February, it seems probable that they will die like flies in the trenches. And we were a little afraid they might have left some cholera in the Pamir, and Fourgues is not keen on it a bit, having seen a real epidemic in China. So he was glad when they sent us to Sunderland for coal, because he makes out that coal, although dirty, is the best antiseptic known for most diseases.

At Sunderland we loaded a good three thousand tons, and pretty smart, too. What is it going to cost France, all these hundreds of thousands of tons of coal which must be bought abroad? It won’t be a small price! I know that the Boches have bagged our northern mines, but there are other mines in France. Evidently they would not be sufficient for all needs; but if we exploited them and decreased our purchases by a quarter, at least, that much would not be going out and the value of our franc would not fall as it is doing. It is vexatious for a country as rich as ours to spend all that good French money and to see how they give you the change with five or ten per cent. discount. It will be nice if that goes on! I asked Fourgues why the coal was left in the earth when it would be so much better in the bunkers or the fireplace. He replied that this was because of a law of public welfare under the Revolution, made to prohibit illicit gain, and that the same law of public welfare did not permit us even now to take our underground riches. “It’s just as it was at H——,” he added; “the sub-soil of France constitutes a national reserve! It would seem that it’s better to be ruined than to touch it!”

But the coal we got at Sunderland was not for the French after all, for they sent us to the English Grand Fleet. The Bulls were getting expeditions ready for Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Dardanelles; they had no boats free, and as Jellicoe’s fleet was yelling for coal, we were sent in a hurry. I don’t tell you where the Pamir went to find the Grand Fleet because it is most strictly forbidden. Even the English journals haven’t the right to mention it, and, anyway, you may be sure my letter would be censored. They don’t want the Germans to know where the English ships are.

The Pamir made the trip up there from Sunderland twice, and, I can tell you, there are just a few of them—battleships and cruisers and all the rest! What are all I saw at Fano besides this? Nothing, my poor old chap! If the Bulls haven’t yet got going for war on land, I beg you to believe that they have one or two ships, and some beauties!

Only, they don’t wear them out. The squadrons rest quietly at anchor and from time to time they go out and look for the Boches, or if the Boches come out, they pounce on them. In this way the engines and crews are not worn to bits like the French fleet. You bet the English officers, who were awfully bored, by the way, invited Fourgues and me over during the coaling and questioned us because we had come from the other end of the war! Honestly, they thought we were kidding them when we told them that the whole lot of you, but especially the cruisers and destroyers, were kept cruising up and down with your tails well up, for forty and fifty days at a time, trying to block up the Adriatic. They asked us if it was also the custom in the French army, when a regiment was not fighting, to have it march back and forth behind the lines for five and six weeks at a time. And then a lot of other questions by which we could see that they couldn’t make head or tail of it.

That’s not to say that the Grand Fleet does nothing. The cruisers and destroyers guard the coast of England and patrol as far as Norway. It’s ghastly to see the storms they have to face and the state in which they return. So they are given a rest—sent to port with leave for everybody! And you know it makes no end of difference slogging near your native land, feeling that you are protecting it and that when duty is over, you may go and pass a day or two with your family.

They are all as jolly as sandboys, except that they are a bit sick at not having been able to fight the big fight with the Germans. Apart from that, they feel that the English fleet is doing its duty, and they cannot understand why you are kept on the go as we described to them. I’m not saying this to rile you, old man, now that you are in the Navy and, as Fourgues says, infected with its spirit, but the English sailors are rather fresher than yours. And you should see the difference in age! When you go with your coal from one English ship to another and chat with this one and that, you might think you are talking to a pal even when it’s an Admiral. On the French cruisers the commander always has white hair and a white beard; it tires him to climb a ladder, and he is afraid of saying too much. Fourgues claims that the Brass Hats are even worse, but I have never seen them. At any rate, for the destroyers here they give them to quite young men, from twenty-five to thirty years old, while down there all I saw were well over forty with pepper-and-salt hair. It’s like that from the top down, ten or fifteen years’ difference. The keenness is in proportion. I don’t know what I shall be like at forty, but certainly with rheumatism and nice little liver complaint I should find it pretty tough to be set on a destroyer where one is drenched from the first of January until the thirty-first of December, and to command no more than seventy men. Whereas, if I could have that now, my word, shouldn’t I be pleased and go right ahead and laugh at being wet to the bones, because I should know that when I got to be forty or fifty, if I had served well, I should command a squadron with thousands of men and a lot of ships!... Maybe I’m wrong and the English too, but I wish you would explain to me why we don’t do the same as they.

I told you that the Pamir made two trips between Sunderland and the Grand Fleet. On the second they sent us to hell and gone, up north into the midst of the islands where there was filthy weather, and where the Pamir coaled flotillas of destroyers and scouts. These are on the go all the time—with intervals of leave in England, you may be sure—near German waters, and they say that the Boches will never come out for a real big battle, but that it isn’t worth while trying to get them out of their holes because their coast waters are full of mines and submarines and the game wouldn’t be worth the candle. The English would be blown up before getting anywhere near. Although this is not what the English and French papers say, I think we can believe those who have been there. “If there is a serious battle,” they say, “it will be a surprise; not because we shall have willed it.” The Boches, it seems, are informed from England itself, where a lot of their countrymen are at large, and as soon as an English ship puts to sea, Berlin is warned. Whereas when the Germans come to bombard the English coasts, no one knows about it until the shells begin to fall.

They also say that the Allies are a little too good about respecting neutral territorial waters and that the Germans don’t hesitate to borrow Danish or Dutch waters to sneak from Kiel over to Ostend or Bruges. This reminds me of what I saw off the coast of Italy the first time we coaled the French Fleet. While our cruisers and destroyers were stopping ships at sea, the Pamir ran across lots of boats close to the Italian coast, going up to Trieste or in that direction, and they were well-loaded, believe me.

If that’s the way we are blockading the Boches, they won’t need to cry “Kamerad!” yet awhile! I wish you would tell me how many cargoes of contraband the Navy has seized. I ask you a lot of questions, but that’s because you wrote in your last letter that it interested you, too, to know what goes on outside of your Auvergne.

As you added that my mind was improving with the war, I address myself to my sometime lieutenant, if you please, in order to form my little judgment! You know I tell you everything that comes into my head, just as I used to do when you said that I talked hot air. Anyway, it’s something if I’ve learnt to listen! Good Lord, how stupid I must have been, only two years ago! Fourgues, too, claims that I improve.

That old rascal did play me a dirty trick. When we got back to Newcastle he nailed me to the ship and ran up to London for a change of air. I must tell you that on returning from Scotland we ran into one of those little spring gales which put two boilers out of business and loosened the collars of our broken shaft, which we have trundled about ever since August. Then, as the Pamir ha’n’t been out of commission since Alexandria, Fourgues said he wouldn’t go another step till they put the ship in the dock, examined her hull, retubed the boilers, and changed the shaft. The Bulls wanted to send him up there again with three thousand tons of coal for the Fleet, but Fourgues answered that an old fox like him knew when a boat has had its bellyful, and that he didn’t intend that the Pamir should break down like a silly, when he was the one to catch it and not the rest of them.

In order to get things his own way in peace, he took the train that very evening. While he was packing his bag he called me into his cabin:

“Look, my boy, here is a paper. I hand over to you command of the Pamir and of the whole show. Have her put into the dock and thoroughly repaired. I shall see if you can cope with an emergency. They played the same trick on me in Melbourne on my boat when I knew less than you. When the hull is repainted, the boilers retubed, and the shaft replaced, telegraph me at the Charing Cross Hotel, London. I give you ten days. Put it through!”

“But, captain, to whom shall I address myself?”

“You’re in charge and you have a tongue. As for me, I’m going up to London to raise hell to get the wireless, and if the owner won’t put it in, I’ll go to Paris. But I don’t want to hear a word from the Pamir until you wire me ‘Ready!’ Do you understand?”

“Certainly, captain, but——”

“Rubbish! Here are the keys, the papers, the cheques, and everything. If you are ready in ten days I shall see that you get your skipper’s ticket for foreign trade, because then they can give you a ship all to yourself. Otherwise, you’ll whistle for it.”

He shook hands and was gone. So for the last four days, old man, I have been muddling through. It is just as though you had been put in command of the Auvergne and being master is very different from receiving orders. There are a lot of things in which you have to make a decision, instead of merely listening and carrying on. Before, I used to think that Fourgues had rather a heavy hand, but now I think that to make things go you have to have an eye on everything and not spare your men. Most of the time I am in overalls rummaging around the boilers and in the tunnel of the screw. Things are coming on. The Pamir has been scraped and will get her second coat of paint to-day. One boiler and half of another have been retubed. Fourgues calculated the business very well. It can be done in ten days by not losing an hour. We are hard at it. The crew is all right. You know what it is to fall in love with a boat; and then when you see that you are of some use—say, old man, if we are ready in ten days there’ll be no holding me.

Malta,
June 17, 1915.

Dear old Man,

I believe the Pamir really is engaged this time in the Eastern affair. We have been here for a month and a half and it doesn’t look as though it were going to be over right away. I ask nothing better, because at present this is the only place where interesting things are happening. Fourgues also is pleased. We get about, we transport stuff. We are not doing the big work, sure, but at any rate the Merchant Service is doing all it can and the old Pamir wastes no time.

She runs all by herself now, since the shaft and tubes were changed—which is to say that she is entirely refitted. At Newcastle I wasn’t ready in ten days after all, but in eleven. But as we were well advanced the tenth day, I wired Fourgues “Ready!” and then shook in my shoes for fear he would get there before it was all done. I made them work night and day the last twenty-four hours, but the crew never flinched. In short, when Fourgues arrived they were letting the water into the dock and an hour afterwards the Pamir was alongside the wharf. Of course he saw I’d cheated a little, but said never a word, for his little trip had put him in a good temper.

“Very good, my boy. I will send a report to the owner and say that he can give you a boat when one is free—which won’t be yet awhile, you may be sure.”

This made me rather sick, though, as you can imagine I’d have liked to have a tub of my own during the war! Then Fourgues explained. He had had time to go to Paris and had brought back a lot of information. It seems that in France all construction is suspended because the war will be over before the end of the year and we should think of nothing but war-work and munitions. As all the merchant-ships are being used at the present moment, I shan’t get a command for the deuce of a time. Fourgues also saw the owner and had rather a hot encounter because he would not pay for the wireless, saying that the Pamir had got along like this for nearly ten months and that it was not worth while undertaking the expense, for whereas wireless was good for the illustrated papers that tell tall stories about it, at bottom it wasn’t much use. There was nothing to be done with the owner, so Fourgues went to the Admiralty where they said much the same thing. It seems that we are quite safe on the sea, that we’ve got the upper hand, that the German submarines are all bluff, and that, anyway, the Germans haven’t any. Fourgues is not of this opinion, not exactly. He says that the Germans aren’t so stupid as to leave us in peace on the sea and that they are preparing one of their extra-specials for us. But all the official Johnnies wouldn’t hear of this, so there was nothing to be done—the Pamir went out as before. The owner told him to add nothing, not even a lookout at the masthead. But Fourgues had one installed under the pretext that fifty francs more or less would ruin neither the owner nor the shareholders. They don’t lose their time, those gentlemen! The Pamir, which is nearly twenty years old, is chartered at about fifty pounds a day, without counting the coal, repairs, insurance, freight, and everything. The shareholders have only to open their pockets—the money tumbles in! At that rate, in a year they will have enough to pay for two or three other Pamirs, but not enough, of course, for them to spare a few thousand francs for the wireless!

But I nearly forgot to tell you about another fuss. You will remember that we struck the cruiser Lamartine on the occasion of our first coaling at sea and that we smashed her davits and one of our lifeboats. It wasn’t Fourgues’ fault, you remember, and he said that it must all be repaired at Newcastle. But the owner refused outright to pay anything, saying that that sort of damages were not included in the agreement. The Navy also refused, under the pretext that it is not responsible henceforth for a ship on which the captain is not in the Government service. They demanded a report from Fourgues and will also ask the Lamartine for one. All that will mean filling up forms and complications without end. Nevertheless, we sail with two lifeboats, as Fourgues preferred to pay out of his own pocket for the new one rather than do without.

At Newcastle the Pamir took on field-guns for the English Expeditionary Force in the Dardanelles and shells for the big guns of their battleships. They are of a different calibre. We put the guns in the hold forward and the shells aft. As we had a good deal of room left aft, because the twelve-inch shells, though heavy, take little space, they told us to go by way of Gibraltar to fetch the supplies and baggage of a company of soldiers bound for Gallipoli who were to leave at the same time as we, but on another boat. All this was a little complicated, but we have seen plenty of complications since the war began. Moreover, the English aren’t fussy. The officers who supervised the loading would come around for five minutes every day, take a look and go away.

This is the first time that the Pamir has carried shells—real ones, charged with high explosive—and you can imagine how scared we were that one of them would fall into the bottom of the hold and blow the old hooker to blazes! Fourgues seized the opportunity to have all the cables of the winches and the steel-work of the derricks changed, saying that they were a little old and that he could not guarantee their strength. The English made no bother at all about it, but gave us a fine cable, brand-new, of high quality steel. We even had two or three hundred yards left! Didn’t I tell you, the Pamir sailed refitted fore and aft?

It took ten days to get to Gib., which is rather long, but as we ran into a lot of fog, with that kind of cargo Fourgues was not anxious to have a collision so he slowed down. Think of it! We had the munitions of two big English battleships, and if the Pamir went down, they would have had to wait at least two months before they could send the Turks a single shell! Really, Fourgues knows his business. When we have a cargo of rubbish he doesn’t care at what speed he goes or into what weather, but with this stuff aboard he keeps inspecting the holds to see if all is safely stowed and that no cases of cartridges are broken or shells lying around loose.

The English stowed it all very well, however, with good oak and new pine. There was no danger of it shifting. The Pamir is rich! We shall have all that timber, and Fourgues hopes they will give him more munitions to transport, now that he is fitted up for it, because that seems more like real war-work.

At Gib. the company of soldiers for which the Pamir was to carry supplies waited for us until the night before. But as we were held back by the fog and as the company was wanted in the East in a hurry, they went, piling their stuff on the deck of their boat. But the English didn’t wish to waste the hundred tons we had at their disposal, so they dumped in a great lot of preserves and jam and chocolate which was waiting on the dock. English soldiers feed jolly well, and the war must be costing England a pretty penny. We bought tobacco at Gibraltar and cards and Spanish wine. It is cheap and of good quality. But the place is as dull as ditch-water. It is apparently because of the war. There’s nothing worth seeing there except the landscape with the rocks. For the rest it might be a penal settlement.

The Pamir steered straight for Mudros, where they told us to report and get our orders on the spot. In the Mediterranean the weather was not so very bad, but all the same, Fourgues is right—one never knows what’s going to happen in the way of weather; the wind changes without one’s knowing why and the sea rises in an hour. The Pamir had a roughish time, all the more so as Fourgues wouldn’t go fast because of the explosives in the hold. But it wasn’t worth the trouble carrying those shells, because when we reached Mudros they told us that of the two ships which were to take them, one had been sunk by a submarine the week before at the Dardanelles, and the other, after just escaping the same fate, had returned to Malta to be repaired. But how damned stupid it is to have known nothing at all about it simply because we had no wireless! We looked as though we had come down from the moon with our shells for the —— and the ——, and everybody was laughing at us.

If we had been informed, Fourgues would have put in at Malta to learn what to do with the ammunition, as it was of a special kind and couldn’t be used by the other English ships that were there. Well, so we kept the ammunition and left the jam and preserves! There was no difficulty about them—everybody wanted them; they were unloaded before you could say “Jack Robinson.” As for the field-guns, no one was willing to take them off because it seems that they were done at the front and the written instructions were not sufficiently clear. We lost two days waiting for orders from Egypt, from English Headquarters. Finally they told us to go to Alexandria where the guns would be assigned to a brigade that was forming. During this time the troops in Gallipoli were crying with all their might and main for guns and we had only to carry them over—we were so very near! But our order was imperative and we went to Alexandria. When we got there they said that the English brigade had already started and that we must catch up with it immediately at Gallipoli, without which it would have ammunition and no guns. We set out again at once and arrived on that part of the coast where the troops they call the Anzacs are stationed. They unloaded the guns as quickly as they could. Since its arrival the brigade has been shelled a good deal without being able to reply, having no artillery, and they went for us a little about it, but it was no fault of ours. We stayed there five days, as the lighters were few and the coast pretty difficult. The Turks fired some big shells at the Pamir—they fell all around but never touched her. Fourgues was as happy as a god. He stood, leaning against the taffrail with his field-glass, watching the shots:

“There, my boy, that one’s too short! That’s too far! They’ll never get the old Pamir!”

Alongside there was the steamer Terre-de-Feu, which was carrying fodder and near which we stayed for two days. Old Man Plantat, a friend of Fourgues, commands her and came on board the Pamir for a meal. Plantat has been up and down the Ægean Sea ever since the beginning of the Dardanelles show and he told us all there is to know. I believe you’ve met him; he said he remembered you. He is just the same devil-may-care sort as ever. He said that the whole business in the East is foredoomed, and that we shall never get to Constantinople because we didn’t do what we should have done at the very beginning, and now it’s too late; the Turks won’t let themselves be taken unawares and are sending out mines and submarines all the time.

He also said that at the beginning, when the Bouvet and other boats were lost, there was nothing to do but push right on without looking back; that we should have squeezed through and that Constantinople would have been reduced by our guns, except for a lot of diplomatic delays beforehand and a lot of wobbling at the time; but that now there is no use worrying ourselves about it any more. We shall only lose men and ships and money and be obliged to go away in the end without having done anything.

I repeat this as Plantat said it. But I omit his arguments, which you must understand better than I, on the Auvergne, where you get all the wireless news. This is the first time that Fourgues and I have heard anything serious about Eastern matters, for we have only the newspapers and the statements of official persons who all keep saying that Constantinople will be taken to-morrow. Ever since I began the Naval History you sent me, I have been saying to myself, as I read the accounts of the Admirals and Ambassadors of the old time, “What humbugs!” But I forgot that no one perceives this until one or two hundred years afterwards on searching the records, and that at the time they seemed to be “It.” Now, as I ponder and listen to men like Fourgues and Plantat, who are not easily fooled, I see clearly that in this war it is the same old business. The more newspapers there are, the less one knows of the truth. Of course, it’s not the Pamir that will win the war, but I’ll be hanged if ever we know why or for what reason they send us here, there and then away again!

When we are in one place, the authorities say that there is evidently a bit of a wash-out round there, but that it’s all going to straighten out soon, and that, anyway, everything is going well everywhere else. We are reassured. And then the Pamir arrives somewhere else—and she gets about a good deal, as you can testify—and we hear the same old story. What does it mean? They are a lot of liars and Tommy and Jack are the ones who suffer!

And who can think that everything is going for the best in face of a job like ours after Gallipoli? I wrote you on another page how that brigade without guns was shelled for two days. The coast is as hard as marble, the Turkish guns are on the heights, and there is no way of sheltering yourself from them. When they had got the range and things began to fall too close, there was nothing to do but move away if you could, since you can’t stop those shells with your hand. So there were not a few wounded, without counting those who had caught fever or colic before they had been there forty-eight hours and were half dead. And not a hospital-ship in the roads!

As the Pamir was proceeding to Malta to carry those shells to the battleship that was being repaired there, they sent aboard a hundred broken arms and legs and as many sick. Fortunately, we had the planks left from the Morocco Boches and from the stowage of the field-artillery. We were able to manufacture a whole set of cots on the deck and in the forward hold. It was splendid the way the crew worked. Engine-room men, firemen, deckhands—everybody—nailed, screwed, and hammered for four days. You can do anything with fellows like that! Fourgues could grumble and say it was not going fast enough, but all the same there were tears in his eyes, especially when, almost before a cot was finished, it was filled with a poor devil who looked as if he were dying but smiled as soon as he was at rest. Sometimes three or four would come at once, and we put them where we could while we nailed on the last boards of their cots. The hammer-strokes gave them headache, but they waited smiling.

Finally the Pamir set out, with her explosives in the aft hold and her sick in the forward hold and everywhere else. They were able to give us a young doctor and two hospital orderlies. I don’t know why the three aren’t dead of fatigue, with their two hundred sick and wounded. For medicines and antiseptics we had a single chest which was emptied before Matapan. The fever patients and those who had colic began to improve, and as it was necessary to set them on their feet again, the crew of the Pamir asked me to give them their ration of wine and meat if there wasn’t enough to go round. How can you punish jossers like that when they break loose on land? For four days the men of the Pamir drank water and ate beans or the rice that was left from the Hindus, and nothing besides, for the storeroom was cleaned out. Fourgues gave all his rum, his brandy, his cigarettes, and his cigars. I, who hadn’t anything, turned over my handkerchiefs and shirts for dressings. We were lucky to have not one die in the crossing, because it was fine weather all the way and because Fourgues went very slowly in order not to shake the wounded.

They were nearly all fellows from Australia or New Zealand—bony and long and lean. Those who got better told us something about themselves. They had thought they were leaving the Antipodes to defend old England on the French front and they didn’t at all expect to fight the Turks in a country where it can’t be done. Even though mere privates are paid five or six francs a day, the fellows still find that it was a rotten trick to give them a job “without any chance of success,” as they say. But they’ll deal with all that later; for the moment they are happy because after Malta they hope to visit London, which they have never seen.

At Malta they were all landed in a jiffy. It can’t be denied, the English squander money and consider war a sport instead of a vital matter as we do, but they have absolutely princely medical and other services. Where they’re at home, in Gib., Malta, and Egypt, one is obliged to recognize this. The Pamir had scarcely made fast when we were invaded by doctors and nurses by the dozen, and if we were not able to nurse them much on board, I have no fears about how they will fare at Malta. But I find that country most uninteresting and can’t understand why all the fellows are so enthusiastic about it. It may be because after fifty or sixty days at sea they would enjoy Patagonia or Timbuctoo. The whole island is rock, no vegetation, hardly two good walks, and at night a dirty concert-hall where you are packed like herring. You must be better acquainted with it than I, for you are known—to your advantage—by the waiters of the squealing-shop where you broke several saucers, who laughed when I asked them if you had passed that way. It looks as though I shall never meet you, for there were not a few big French ships in the port, but not a sign of the Auvergne.

They told me that you were flying the Admiral’s flag now, the Admiral’s ship having gone into dry-dock, and that you were mooching along the coast of Crete. Better luck next time, old man.

As for us, we left our shells, although the English warship had sailed for Portsmouth to be dismantled, as it would have taken a good six months before she could fire a gun again. She got a nasty jar. The Bulls wanted us to go back to England with the ammunition, but Fourgues wouldn’t go! He said that with the heat and without any means of ventilating the holds, he would not keep the shells on the Pamir for fear one of these days she would blow up without warning. The authorities kicked, saying that the ammunition would be on their hands in Malta, no other ship having guns of the necessary type. But when Fourgues gets anything into his head and feels sure he is right neither God nor the Devil will make him change his mind, so they were obliged to unload all the ammunition. Now we are empty, but it is probable that they will send us to the Levant again where everybody says that decisive operations are to take place which will put the thing through this time. Fourgues isn’t sure of that and, speaking for myself, neither am I. It would be better if they knew more clearly what they were going to do. Here is the Pamir, which for eight days has earned a thousand francs a day doing nothing! Don’t you call that good money wasted?

And now there is a sirocco blowing which is laying us all on our backs. Fourgues and I spend our time on the bridge, fanning ourselves and watching the movements of the great hookers which come and go. One has to acknowledge that it’s pretty work. Fourgues is very enthusiastic, and you know he can handle a ship a bit himself. It’s like Paris in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare, there are so many little and big boats and never a collision.

To speak again of myself, I have had a letter from La Rochelle and my fiancée writes that, as the war seems to be dragging on, there is no reason why we should wait for the end—that we could be married at the first opportunity. I should like to very much, but I want your advice. Do you think it is better to wait for peace and not marry on the spur of the moment? I have saved a thousand francs, although the owner doesn’t give us a sou more now than in time of peace. With this we could start. We should try to get you in France for the wedding! Write me what you think. Sometimes I get the hump a bit, being always on the go and never knowing when it is going to end. I wish I were like Fourgues. When he is down in the mouth he blackguards everyone all round and gets rid of it like that. But I’m not that way. He has just gone ashore because the French liaison officer wishes to give him orders. Perhaps to-night we shall know where we are going. But the mail-boat for the Navy is sailing at once and I don’t want to miss it. Take care of yourself, old man, and write.

Archangel,
September 15, 1915.

Dear old Man,

If you received safely three or four post-cards that I have sent you during the last three months, you may well have asked yourself where the Pamir was going to stop. Cabes, Brest, Trondhjem—they are not precisely in the same latitude! And now we are even higher up, but there is nothing beyond this and you needn’t fear that we shall try to rediscover the North Pole. As a matter of fact all those places fit in quite well, as you will learn. We have seen interesting things; it’s not too warm in summer here, and the old Pamir and all of us are pleased with our little saunter. At Malta, Fourgues came back with the order to leave immediately for Sfax in Tunis. He wanted to know why, but was told to obey orders without asking questions. So we got up steam and ran out of the barrage by night. The English know how to protect their harbours and ports. Wherever there are warships or loaded merchant vessels at anchor, they don’t make them waste time watching for submarines. Nets, buoys, an effective screen of trawlers on guard—and the people inside can sleep soundly. I wouldn’t say that all this is sufficient to drive off submarines, but it does save unnecessary watches. In any case, it’s better to guard against under-sea boats, acknowledging their existence, than to say publicly that they do not exist and actually to keep all sailors on the lookout all the time.

But that’s only my view. The Pamir set out for Sfax. In the morning we passed two French warships which must have been coming from Bizerta. Fourgues noticed that they were steaming straight ahead on their course and said that was a good way to be torpedoed. I reminded him that the Navy doesn’t believe in submarines, so it isn’t worth their while to zigzag and retard the run. Then he asked me why, if they don’t believe in them, they keep everybody on the lookout with all guns loaded and all the rest of it; that they ought to choose, and if there are any, not to say that there aren’t and annoy all sea-going folk. I pass the problem on to you.

At Sfax we found a battalion of Algerian riflemen, Turcos, and other little niggers, which we were to transport to the south of Tunis with their horses and all their outfit. It seems that since the Italians entered the war, things haven’t gone very well in Tripoli. The Touaregs fell on them and pushed them back towards Tunis, and so France is forming an Expeditionary Corps down there in the south to teach the Arabs what’s what. That makes one more place where transports are needed. They take whatever boats pass within reach, so the Pamir was called from Malta. At first they made us carry whatever we found wherever we were, though we never found anything where they sent us. But this time we left and arrived with a purpose.

The Arabs were as good as gold in their coarse yellow and blue uniforms and they didn’t care a damn about anything. For officers they have toughs who drink hard and give a man cells if he so much as looks like grumbling. They wanted to go to Champagne to see what is happening there and are pretty sick to be heading for the desert to fight camels.

But they, too, don’t care a damn about anything, and as long as they fight somebody the place doesn’t matter. The Touaregs will find their match!

As a harbour, Cabes is not ideal and it was hot enough to make the very pebbles sweat. I wonder how the Arabs endure it with their clothing of wool and camel’s hair. But they claim that the thicker it is, the cooler. I preferred to take their word for it, and, as I was half-melted, found it simply overpowering to stay there four days waiting for orders. Not one of us set foot on land, not even Fourgues, who loves to stretch his legs wherever we go. The mere idea of moving about in that furnace made everyone prefer to remain half-naked on board. Finally we got an order to make for Brest. Fourgues thought it was a joke and that the telegram had been wrongly transmitted; but it was Brest all right. He thinks the owner is behind it all, trying to have the Pamir sent from one weird place to another because that increases the money he draws. I believe he is right.

So we were off for Brest and very glad to leave the Mediterranean in the hot season. Moreover, it was a long time since we had been home or read the papers: everybody thought perhaps we might stay awhile, with the chance of getting into touch with things again and of getting news. You can’t imagine how after a time it weighs on one not to know what’s going on. On the Auvergne you get wireless messages from France and elsewhere and there are telegrams passing around all the time which explain things. But on the Pamir we are as stupid as can be because the papers never say anything about Naval affairs anyway. Of course, there is the heading “Marine,” and then—a blank! So the people at home think we are doing nothing. As they are absolutely ignorant about the sea, it’s impossibly to make them understand how we work on boats like yours and the Pamir. The Navy is spoken of a little now, but the only time that we of the Mercantile Marine get into the news-sheets is when a cargo-boat runs aground or collides with another or founders. So the public imagines that merchant vessels pass their time in port or in adding to catastrophes; whereas they are at least as useful as the postmen, railwaymen, munition makers, and the like, of whom the papers and the Ministers are talking all the time. It’s just that those fellows are on the spot and can make themselves heard. As for us, they are dead sure they won’t see us arriving with our boats in the Place de la Concorde, so they suppress the things that concern us. Really, it’s not fair. But here I am, talking politics! I get that from Fourgues, but it’s also because I haven’t been to La Rochelle.

We had barely arrived in Brest, when they crammed us full of rifles for the Russians, who it seems are fighting in Poland with wooden sticks. I never saw so many rifles in my life, and there are whole cargoes like that, going from England and other places. The Pamir also carried revolvers, machine-guns—all the small arms, in short. The cartridges went in another boat.

The authorities were hustling us and came on board every few minutes to see if we were ready to start, as we had to go with all speed to Trondhjem, in Norway, and await cargo boats from America and England in order to make the voyage to Russia with them under the protection of British cruisers. In short, it was deuced urgent—the Russians were waiting for their rifles and it was a question of minutes! Not one of us had time in the midst of all this to go ashore, except Fourgues, on matters of business. The more we loaded, the more came. We put the cases everywhere, on the deck, in the fo’c’sle, in all the empty cabins, till there was hardly room to move. If fire had broken out ... my word, with all those wooden cases and well-oiled implements! But Fourgues says he was born under a lucky star and that I must admit it.

The Pamir left without my having needed to buy a railroad time-table and it made my heart ache to pass the Goulet. My fiancée will think that it was because I didn’t want to, for she is like all civilians, who imagines that one does as one pleases.... But you know how it is—after two or three days you get into harness again and you tell yourself that it will come out all right some day. As the Channel isn’t safe, they ordered us to go to Trondhjem by way of the Irish Channel, and we saw some English destroyers cruising on the very spot where a year ago they broke the war news to us.

“Perhaps they are the same!” said Fourgues. “Eh, my boy, we have blown around some miles since that time and the Pamir is still going strong!” And that’s the truth.

It is never very smooth around Norway, but the Pamir was so heavily laden that the seas went over her without her ever flinching. She was, of course, as slow as a tortoise, but in spite of that we got to Trondhjem ahead of time. As we are still without wireless, Fourgues couldn’t know whether we were ahead of the convoy or behind it, so, after rolling for a day in sight of the coast, he put into the fjord, for it seemed hardly worth while burning coal and wearing out the boat for nothing. The semaphore signalled us that the convoy had not been sighted at sea and that we should be notified. So Fourgues was relieved and proceeded to anchor at the farther end, amongst the other ships waiting there.

We waited two days and should have been rather bored, in spite of the bright nights, the midnight sun, the calm waters, and all those things which land-lubbers tell about who have only made one voyage in their lives and have never experienced dirty weather, except that this fellow Fourgues can’t drop anchor anywhere without running up against an old acquaintance. At Trondhjem it was an American with whom he had knocked around once upon a time on the coast of Chili and who, since the war, was plying between the United States, Norway, and Russia. They recognized one another through their field-glasses and the American—Flamigan or Flannigan—came over in his cutter. The two old cronies fell on each other’s necks—it was ten or twelve years since they had met—and all the time we stayed in the fjord, Fourgues, Flannigan and I were as thick as thieves. There was also Flannigan’s mate, who smoked his pipe, drank his whiskey, and said nothing. If you ever meet Flannigan, go right at him without mincing things. He would talk a dog’s hind leg off and is not afraid of saying what he thinks.

Fourgues asked him at once if he had been to Germany, but he swore by all the gods that he hadn’t, though he carries merchandise wherever his Company orders him without feeling obliged to ask to whom it goes. He claimed that he had not been beyond Holland or Denmark, but that’s not quite certain. He might have said it so as not to hurt us, for he loves France, England a little less—having an Irish father—but above all is an American, and told us a lot of things which people in France might take to heart. It was amusing, all the same, to hear someone on affairs in the North, after having listened to Plantat—I believe I told you of him—on those of the East, with an interval of only four months. In this way one gets ideas about the side-shows of the war and what is being thought here, there and elsewhere.

You won’t mind if I tell you what I hear in one place and another, will you? You aren’t obliged to believe any of it, although I write nothing but what I see or hear. And then, you know, fellows such as Plantat and Flannigan are like uncensored newspapers, so there is more chance of their speaking the truth.

Flannigan assures us that the Germans don’t go to sea now much because they won’t risk their merchant vessels in waters where the Allies are sure to nab them sooner or later; but that, in the main, it’s a clever trick to keep for after the war ships that are not worn out, that are in a way almost new, in order to take over the carrying trade everywhere when peace comes and all our merchant vessels are done for. And at bottom, Flannigan can’t be wrong, for if all the ships are made to slog around like the Pamir, they will last as long as they do last, but those of the Boches will be in quite a different condition. Fourgues adds that it’s not worth while trying to deny it, as the Allied nations aren’t building a single ship, and anyway a ship can’t be put together in five minutes like a regiment.

So from that side, if we don’t do something in advance, we’re sure to be skinned by the Boches when peace first comes, for they’ll immediately take up all their former trade as well as all that we have lost. The Germans are saying this among the neutrals, and what is more, according to Flannigan, their big commercial and industrial firms in Saxony or Westphalia are at present sending all over the world catalogues of goods to be delivered during the war, from four to six months after the order. Isn’t that the limit? Fourgues told Flannigan it was German bluff! But, no indeed! Flannigan went over to his ship to look for bills of lading of merchandise taken aboard at Rotterdam, Bergen, or elsewhere in the neutral countries, and proved to us, evidence in hand, that he had transported cargoes of products made in Germany since the war and that he was not the only one. It was going to Brazil, the United States, or wherever there were purchasers. He even stated that there had come into France by way of the neutral countries certain hundreds of thousands of tons for which we had paid with our good money. What are we to believe, old man, when the newspapers and the Ministers and the rest keep yelling to us that Germany is economically ruined and dying of starvation? Flannigan can’t be lying, for the neutrals have to get merchandise from somewhere while France is producing nothing and England is beginning to have all she can do to look after herself. As to food, Flannigan says that famine in Germany makes a good story, but that we had better tighten the blockade if we want them to tighten their belts. All this is not very pleasant to hear, but when the person who says it is sincere and has seen things, one can only regret that it’s not known at home and, in any case, that nothing is done to remedy it. This is not to say that they are going to beat us, but just that we ought to prevent them making fools of us.

And they know they’re doing so, as we saw clearly in the German papers Flannigan brought from his boat and which he translated to us by the hour, as neither Fourgues nor I know the language. I’ll not tell all that, because you must know what they are saying from the wireless communications received on the Auvergne. But there are a lot of little details by which one can see how they pull the strings and how we move accordingly. For instance, we are forbidden to say where the English fleet is. Well, the illustrated halfpenny papers present the Germans with photographs of the English fleet, the names of all the ships, their anchorage, the number of their guns, and everything. No one in France knows the names of the French generals in command of the armies nor the official description of sectors, but the German papers serve this up to their readers every morning. As to Naval espionage, Flannigan repeated a hundred times that the Germans know more than no matter what high Admiral of the Entente, and that before the news of the movement of an Allied cargo-boat or warship reaches Paris or London it is known in Berlin and corresponding orders have been given.

It would be nothing if they stopped there, but Flannigan says they have understood that the maritime problem will be solved for them by the submarine. He gave us details of such precision that we saw very well he had been in there and had heard the Germans talk at home. Then he recollected himself. But one thing is certain, the Germans are constructing a formidable type of submarine with guns, mines, etc., and though time is needed to manufacture a series of such craft, within a definite period they will have something thoroughly ugly ready in the way of under-sea warfare.

Fourgues repeated to Flannigan how he had been made fun of at the Admiralty in Paris when he talked of submarines, and Flannigan answered that it was our business if we waited till the Huns started; that the Germans didn’t hesitate to say what they meant to do and that when we were once in the soup it wouldn’t do any good to call them pirates while they simply went on sinking our ships. In regard to piracy, Flannigan, who, being a neutral, is above all a partisan of the freedom of the seas, says that everybody is laughing at the Allies with our scrupulous observance of the Hague Convention and that the Germans won’t be more scrupulous at sea than they are on land, if they have the means, because the new international laws will be made by the victor and because, with their submarines, they will soon show us that the old ones no longer count. Flannigan reasoned well:

“You established your German frontier by the Treaty of Frankfort and you announced this diplomatically to the world. Did that hinder Germany from invading you where she wanted to, or you from entering Alsace which you had recognized as a German possession? Therefore, in the stress of war treaties no longer mean anything, for your first effort is to destroy them. And so what’s the good of yelping about international laws? Germany doesn’t care a damn and is counting on victory to change them to her advantage. Why don’t you do the same? Everything that links you with Germany is destroyed. Her signature is no longer worth the paper it’s written on, yet you continue to embarrass yourselves with it till the whole world believes that it is Germany who makes war while you follow after, six months or a year behind. It’s like their cards for meat, sugar, the national register, and all that, at which your papers poke fun, saying that Germany is at the end of her strength and that next winter she will be dead—you will come to that, too, if the war goes on. But Germany, who prepared for war during peace, is preparing for peace during war. She does at once, without seeming to be forced to it, that which you will be forced and constrained to do by circumstances. The same with asphyxiating gas, liquid fire, and all the horrors she employs; when your poilus have had enough of dying like flies, you will understand that it is as natural to kill with fire and poison as with shells and bullets. In short, my boys, if you don’t want to have it go on for years and if you want victory, get a move on, for Germany is not going to omit a single means of annoying you.”

I should never finish telling you all that Flannigan said, and all was confirmed during a walk we took with him on shore. We talked with Norwegians who had been in Germany. They told us about the Zeppelins that are going up and down the North Sea and the Baltic every day, whereas there is not a single balloon around England or France.

So, of course, it is not worth while saying that we shall smash the Germans at sea.

As soon as an English destroyer arrives in the North Sea, the Zeppelins announce it in the ports and nothing is left outside but submarines and mines. Seriously, Naval warfare is not what it was, old man, but the Boches are the only ones who seem to have found it out. The Norwegians and the Swedes who were there did not say much—out of politeness, because we were French, but we understood that they think Germany has the advantage, and that, after having chosen to make war, she fights better than we.

Fourgues and I remembered all this when we left and we discussed it till we got to Archangel. The Pamir picked up the convoy at sea ten miles from Trondhjem and we went around Norway together. There were two English cruisers and four destroyers to escort fourteen merchant vessels. It was a fine convoy and all those ships together looked like a naval squadron, but the people who decide the formation of convoys would do well not to group boats going fifteen knots with those which can make seven or eight only by going full speed ahead. After two days’ sailing, the Pamir, which was about in the middle, began to lose sight of those farthest in advance, as well as of those farthest behind. The convoying ships kept tearing up and down to keep us together. We did get together somehow or other, but after the North Cape there was a little spell of choppy seas and rolling and pitching and as much visibility as in a tunnel. It lasted twenty hours, and when the weather cleared there were only six of us out of the fourteen. The fast ones had run ahead; the cripples had simply disappeared. Naturally none of the absent had wireless and the warships spent three days hunting for them. There was one with a damaged rudder that had jammed itself on the jagged reefs they have up there and split in two. The people were fished out, but there’s no fear of the cargo getting to the Russian front.

Finally our convoy dribbled in to Archangel in bunches of three or four. It is the best time up here. After a month and a half or two months, everything will be frozen out, literally and figuratively. But it’s not with fourteen cargoes nor fifty nor a hundred that one could give the Russians what they need! The fleet of the whole world would not be enough, but it is well to give them all we can. It will serve them right—and us too—for letting the Germans get in everywhere! It seems that at the declaration of war three-fourths of their factories were stopped because it was the Germans who ran them. Mechanics can’t be taught in forty-eight hours, as I know after my experience with the shaft of the Pamir; and if you add that the Boches simply appropriated all their factories in Poland, you can see why the Pamir and her consorts must fly to Archangel with war-material. They loaded us at Brest without even giving me forty-eight hours to go to La Rochelle, under pretext that the Russians were waiting for us as for the Messiah. But, Lor’ love you, here there’s no hurry. They have already taken twenty days to unload a part of the fourteen ships and are not nearly through. At the time of writing, the Pamir has had only her forward hold emptied—the aft hold can wait! They sent us away from the docks because of another convoy which had arrived in the meantime and which they began to unload. When all these boats are half emptied they are sure they can’t get away and they let them rot in a corner of the docks.

And whether they hurry or not, it’s all the same. The things lie on the docks in heaps in the rain and the wind. From time to time a train comes along in a leisurely manner, loads up a little pile without hurrying itself, and starts away again in two or three days. If it ever reaches the Carpathians it will be because the track goes downhill. Everywhere it’s the same thing. They say that Russia is great, that she is invincible, that it will take ten years, that the Boches will get to Moscow.... Nitchevo! Napoleon went away again and the Russian-Japanese business wasn’t a defeat. Such, old man, is the country where I find myself at present!

Fourgues could hardly hold himself in at first to see the Pamir lying by idle. Now he has found some friends, Russian Naval and Military officers who come on board and with whom he lunches ashore. When I ask him how much longer we are going to stay here, he answers, “Nitchevo!” in his Provence accent and the Russians roar with laughter. They drink hard and try to get him to do the same, but Fourgues is determined not to drink more than is good and uses the occasion to beat them at poker. Since they will poison themselves up here, he seizes the opportunity to increase his income, the old fox. Mornings, during the cleaning, he tells me what they said when they were half full. Not a few of them are pro-German, especially among the nobility. It seems that there have been formidable scandals at court and in the Ministries. When I try to pump him, Fourgues answers that he ought not to say anything, but that he is glad he is French, for, although at home we do all sorts of stupid things, at least no one is working for the King of Prussia. As Fourgues never jokes about such matters, I believe he must have been hearing some pretty raw stories—about the railways in particular. Cars are lost in Russia, and even whole trains, without anyone knowing what has become of them. And what will they say in Brest when they know that we lay here more than twenty days with their rifles!

Finally, yesterday, Fourgues said that he had had his bellyful of Archangel, vodka, and poker—perhaps he had been losing!—and he got hold of an officer of the port who came along talking hot air, and was promised that the Pamir will be unloaded to-morrow. I dare say that means eight days, but, at any rate, as one of the English cruisers will sail this evening for Youmanie,[1] I shall give her this letter, having finished my twenty pages. You can’t call yourself neglected—eh, old chap? But you are good, too, sending me as much news as you can and your books. I have finished the first volume of the Naval History. I will write about it if I remember. Except for reading, I am bored to death, for at the rate at which the Pamir has been going, I wonder where on earth they will send us next, and in the meantime, what is to become of La Rochelle? Let us hope that by the end of the year, we shall have peace or the wedding! Don’t laugh at me, old boy. I have had about all I can stand.

[1] England.

Mudros,
December 18, 1915.

Here we are again in the Levant after all, but not without adventures, and it’s really no joke to have wandered all round Europe from Archangel to the Dardanelles only to fall into our present scrape. At Toulon I received your letter of the end of September in answer to mine from Archangel. Thanks very much. I shall speak of it if I have time, but for the moment I am going to tell you the adventures of the old Pamir for the last three months. You might indeed call us the Wandering Jews! The longer it lasts, the more they grab merchant ships wherever they find them, putting no matter what on the deck provided it goes away—and to Hell with it!

Fourgues finally did get his stuff unloaded at Archangel and succeeded in sailing without a convoy. He said it wasn’t worth while losing time with boats that can’t get up any speed, and that when there are too many hookers and not enough convoying ships it’s just a little bit too good a target for submarines. Wherever we called I noticed that Fourgues had not been far wrong when he said, at the beginning, that the submarines were going to count later on. The officials are beginning to find them a nuisance. What would happen if all those bureaucrats had to go to sea! They might then find something to say besides: “Pshaw! Don’t believe everything you hear, and, anyway, we sink so many that soon there won’t be any more!” Of course, after that one can only shut up. Mum’s the word in the newspapers and everywhere else!... I will tell you all my little notions as occasion arises.

The Pamir was told to go to Newcastle for orders and, in case there were none, to take aboard coal. We were pretty well shaken up as we were empty. On the return trip we met a good many boats going to Archangel. They needed to hurry, for the ice will soon begin, and if the Russians do not set themselves seriously to work, they can’t smash the Germans with the stuff they received this summer. What good does it do not to tell the public the truth, when sooner or later it is sure to come out? They tell us that in two weeks or in three months everything will go like greased lightning, and then, three months later, things are just the same or a little bit worse. And on whom shall the public lay the blame? On those who have deceived it! For they knew that things would go badly and it was not worth while to say they would go well, and the public is obliged to believe the leaders are to blame, because they didn’t know how to get out of the scrape. You can’t deny it, it’s those who govern who are on the wrong track.

At Newcastle they told us to go to Southampton to ship equipment for the English Expeditionary Forces in France. We had just enough coal to get us across and the Pamir went down the North Sea and the Channel, the papers everywhere saying that the Channel is completely closed to German submarines by means of nets and a host of ingenious devices; saying too, that to reach the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, they will have to go around by way of Scotland, and as they haven’t sufficient radius of action there is nothing further to be feared from them. I don’t know much about it, but having seen what the Germans have done elsewhere, I expect them to find some way of getting through those ingenious devices and also of constructing submarines that will go to the ends of the earth. It’s as plain as the nose on your face and to say the contrary is to act the ostrich. Fourgues says there will be a painful awakening, but that everybody will blame it on the Boches instead of recognizing that we did not make proper provision for the danger. He gets into awful rages, but as far as I’m concerned, if I can only go to La Rochelle I ask for nothing more.

At Southampton we took on motor-cars and tractors for the English Army and carried them to Havre. I had time in England to make a trip on land where there are posters everywhere, begging folks to enlist. It really does look as if the English were bestirring themselves more than last year when they regarded this as a mere Colonial war. That’s not to say they have as yet been affected as seriously as we. They still leave swarms of Boches at liberty, their business firms continue to ship cargoes to the neutral neighbours of Germany, and of course, they can’t with one stroke of the pen re-form an army ready for active service. The majority of their regular officers have already been killed and they are obliged to make captains and first lieutenants out of good cricket and golf players. It will take time for them to train. As to equipment, it’s the same thing—they have hardly begun to mobilize their factories for war production because they did not want to stop British foreign trade. But we can’t say much, for we did the same and it’s hardly a matter of weeks since France began to go to England, America, and Spain for materials—where there are plenty. The Germans went to work early and we’re a year behind them.

There is an awful confusion at Havre and they say Rouen is the same. Really it’s astonishing how the responsible people let cars and war-material pile up in the ports. That comes doubtless from the general ignorance in France as regards all maritime matters and also from the fact that the high Naval officers who are in command at the commercial ports know nothing about traffic. Anyway, Fourgues has to fight to get his stuff unloaded at Havre. They piled it in a heap on the dock, and when we left it was still there in the rain.

While we were there we got orders to go to Marseilles, to get a cargo for the army of the East. The Pamir could have taken from the wharf at Havre some hundreds of tons destined for Toulon or Marseilles; in this way the freightage would have cost less. But it was officially arranged for to go by rail and we left in ballast. Once more we went around Spain without paying for our trip, and even so arrived ahead of time, as our cargo had not all reached Marseilles—because the trains were held up as usual. The papers may talk what rot they like about the preparations made and all the success that will attend us on all the fronts next spring, but we who do the work of transporting the necessary material see plainly that we shan’t outstrip the Boches at our present rate of going.

You know I’ve no excess of admiration for the Boches, and if there were no other reason I should have a grudge against them for the dog’s life they have made us lead for a year and a half, and because of them I don’t see when I can go home. But you know, there are things they do better than we and which we should learn from them if we don’t want to lose months and years. How does it help us to refuse to imitate them in such matters? What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. We shan’t become savages because we forestall them in their tricks. Much good it will do us to wait till we’re compelled to imitate them. In the Naval History you lent me I read recently that the Coalition only beat Napoleon when by dint of being beaten, they learnt to copy him. And it took them fifteen or twenty years, and if they had caught on sooner it wouldn’t have taken so long. Why is it that in France we still run the limited and express trains which I saw arriving in Havre and Marseilles? The Norwegians and Swedes told us that for a long time the Germans have been running all their trains at the same speed, the passengers in between the goods. In that way traffic is not delayed, whereas in France, with the idea of making people behind the lines believe that the war is being won as easily as a game of cards, they put on a lot of fast trains which are only of use to the shirkers and which hold up the shells and war-material at all the stations. So how can you expect things to happen?

I pondered all this when the Pamir was ordered to anchor at Estaque, near Marseilles, for five or six days, as there wasn’t a single foot of unencumbered dock in the port of Marseilles and all because of the congestion on the railways. One day twenty-four of us were rolling and pitching in the mistral; another day there were thirty-two, empty and loaded, each earning a thousand or two thousand francs a day doing nothing.

I tell you, if a Boche submarine came into this road, which is open and without protection, about one or two in the morning, she could send a good half-dozen of craft like the Pamir to the bottom and get away before anyone had time to say “Jack Robinson!” But the land-lubbers, civilians or service men, said the idea was really too funny and that submarines wouldn’t dare come near the coast of France, either here or on the Atlantic! After that, all we can do is to pull ourselves together and await the torpedo with arms folded.

Finally they towed us from Estaque to Marseilles, and then, as the authorities had made us lie around for nearly a week without doing a thing, we must take on board three thousand tons of cargo right off, at one go. The country would be in danger if the Pamir hadn’t slung her hook in forty-eight hours! They made us roll down into our hold the contents of thirty trains, which came in solemn procession, night and day, without stopping. The Pamir was away off to “Hell and gone” in the basin of Arenc and all the stuff was for Mudros—carriages, provisions, shells, guns, shoes—everything, I tell you.

They were tumbled in as they came and I had to stow them. You can imagine how easy it was. Fourgues never ceased cursing, saying that if we had bad weather the cargo would shift to blazes. But they told him to shut his mouth, and they didn’t pick their words. There was one train which came with cases from Milo. There had been a mistake, and they turned out not to be for the Pamir, but for another boat. They arrived about midnight of the second night, and I said to the military officer in charge that it must be a mistake. I didn’t half catch it. He fairly wiped his feet on me, saying that Mudros, Milo, and the whole caboodle, they were all in the East, and that he was ordered to pack into the Pamir all the trains that came and that I was not going to send that one back when they were already late. That Johnny wouldn’t get through a geography exam.

So I shipped the things because the Army bloke ordered me to, but when I informed Fourgues in the morning, he told the Navy bloke, who had come to give us our sailing orders. And the Navy bloke was furious, and said that we were idiotic to load on stuff for Milo when the rest of the material was for Mudros. The military bloke had gone to breakfast. The Navy bloke went after him and they said a few pleasant things to each other. At last it was agreed that the Pamir should stop at Milo and unload the cases and then go on to Mudros. We closed the holds and battened down the hatches and were ready to leave our moorings when another train with a dozen cases of aeroplanes pulled in and came alongside. The non-commissioned officer in charge jumped on board and asked for the skipper:

“Are you the Pamir?”

“Looks like it,” said Fourgues.

“All right; here are twelve aeroplanes for you to take.”

“Well, old fellow, we can tow them if you wish, but as for taking twelve aeroplanes on board, it’s now too late, our hold is full.”

“Not at all! I’ve been waiting at Miramar for two days and I just got the order to-night to send them by the Pamir. The matter is one of the utmost urgency.”

“Oh, yes. And how long ago did your utmostly urgent train leave Paris?”

“Twenty-three days ago!”

What can one do, old man? Such things simply disarm one! When Fourgues heard that the poor devil had been knocking about the main lines of France for twenty-three days with twelve aeroplanes to look after he said we would take all we could. We found places for six, three forward and three aft. The cases are regular monuments, and when they dangle at the end of the cable you have to look out so as not to get your jaw stove in. And to make all that fast! The deck was just broad enough to take them, however, and we served lines over them and lashed them to starboard and port. They rose as high as the bridge.

At this point our old friend the Army bloke paid us another visit and said that, as the Pamir was ordered to take all twelve cases, we must load the remaining six in a second tier on top of the first. Then Fourgues fairly let rip. He produced cusses that I had never heard before and I assure you they were great! He said that his boat was as full as an egg; that it was not the custom to pile cargo higher than the masts; that he had to see to navigate; that he was not sure the six cases we had already wouldn’t pitch overboard with the first good blow, and that the other six might go by the air-route, perhaps, but certainly not on the Pamir. Thereupon he gave the order to sail and we skipped out, leaving the three blokes, the railway man, the Army officer, and the sailor, discussing each other’s characters on the quay.

Fortunately we had no really bad weather from Marseilles to Milo—nothing but moderate rolling and pitching, just enough to get the wind up us about the stowage of our cargo. We could hear hollow sounds of boxes knocking around the hold and some of the stuff must be in a nice state. We didn’t open it up, but it will be lovely and we are the ones that will catch it! However, Fourgues will give as good as he gets, for he can’t stand being blamed when it’s somebody else’s fault. I don’t know what the aeroplanes in their cases will look like. As they were on the deck they swung about a good deal, and no matter how much we tightened the lines with which they were lashed, every time the boat rolled they shifted a little with a “Bang!”

At Milo no one wanted to unload the cases we had taken from the wrong train because the Head of the military unit to whom they were consigned, who should have been there, had gone away several days before. We haven’t yet been able to ascertain his whereabouts. It’s the same old story over and over—enough to make one wild!

In the harbour at Milo there were a lot of war-vessels—French, English, Russian, and Italian—for it seems we are ready to fall upon the Greeks if they keep on keeping on. The English, who got here first, didn’t lose any time before installing nets and a barrier against submarines. It’s very nice to say in the papers and on the platforms that submarines don’t exist, but it’s better to take measures, for they are beginning to sink ships a little bit everywhere. Fourgues says he would have preferred to be wrong, but that everything he had thought is beginning to come true and that it doesn’t amuse him to act the part of Cassandra quite so successfully.

All this time the Pamir continues to be without wireless or guns or anything to protect her, and she is not the only one. At Milo and at Mudros, where we are now, out of every ten ships seven or eight have no wireless, and by gum, you should hear the skippers and officers of those cargo boats! But all they say and all they think, what difference does it make? Everybody knows they will keep on just the same! If they are done in by a submarine the paper will say, “Hun piracy!! Such and such a boat sunk! There were no military on board!” Damn! It’s simply too idiotic the way things at sea are run.

The Pamir went straight on to Mudros without unloading anything. You can have no idea of the moving that’s going on all over the country. They are evacuating everywhere. Good-bye, Constantinople! Good-bye, end of Turkey! Good-bye, Gallipoli, the Dardanelles, the coast of Asia! Good-bye, everything! All the munitions and men that are not too badly damaged are going to Salonica. We are going to save Serbia if it isn’t too late. Suvla is evacuated. The English left millions of francs worth of material which they set on fire. Seddul-Bahr, Kum-Kalé, and Gaba are being rolled into one to make an army of the East, and it’s not a bit too soon to think of putting troops at Salonica, for where, I wonder, are the Boches going to be stopped? It seems that this was an idea of our Président du Conseil. It’s a jolly good thing he put his finger on the spot, for the Dardanelles business was done for several months ago. With an army in Salonica and a Franco-British army at that, we can keep the Boches from getting down any farther. What couldn’t they do in the Mediterranean, I wonder, if they had Greece and the Peloponnesus? But all that is politics again.

The Pamir is waiting at Mudros. All the empty vessels are taken to hasten the evacuation. We are as full as an oyster, and we are left here because there’s no room at Salonica. Where the deuce shall we unload our different sorts of merchandise, our aeroplanes, and our victuals? I don’t know any more than you! But one thing I do know—nothing of all we have brought from Marseilles will ever reach its destination! Oh, it will be used somewhere or other, but everything in this country is upside down and all the Pamir can do is to empty her hold on to the wharf she’s ordered to without troubling about what becomes of it. All this is not funny, old man!

And how long are we going to stay here? Fourgues raises Hell, but that doesn’t help matters. The other ships come and go, but the Pamir receives no orders. I hope she will go to Salonica because I want a squint at what is going on there, but ever since the beginning of the war nothing we have expected has happened, so I don’t care much what it is as long as it can’t be La Rochelle.

So long, old man. I got your last from Bizerta when the Auvergne was in dry-dock. You gave me a good bit of Navy gossip and I should like to comment on it, but a boat is about to leave for Malta and I want to get this letter off. All I can say is that it seems to me not much better on the warships than on hookers like the Pamir. May God grant that on land, in politics, and the diplomatic service they are cleverer than our Naval chiefs! My sole consolation is that the Germans seem to be more fat-headed than we; else, with their preparation and our mistakes at the beginning, they would have mopped us up long since. Not having done so, they won’t be able to. With this consoling thought I wish you a happy New Year and hope that we shall meet in 1916. Je t’embrasse.

PART THREE

Algiers,
January 30, 1916.

Dear old Man,

Guess whom I met yesterday! I’ll give you a thousand guesses. Blangy! You have been asking yourself—as I have—what in the world had become of the old rascal, who had never given us a sign of life. I ran into him in the arcades and I started blackguarding him. He maintained that you and I were the loafers because we had leisure, whereas he had none. I soon saw that he hadn’t changed and was as lazy as ever about writing. As he had a free evening we took our apéritif together and he invited Fourgues to join us at dinner. Blangy isn’t afraid of him any more, now that he is in command of a trawler; indeed he treats Fourgues quite as an equal. During dinner he told all his adventures and there was material enough to fill a book. For six weeks he has been in command of a half-rotten trawler as big as a piano, with a gun as heavy as a pea-shooter, which wouldn’t be capable of going after even a crippled submarine. There are not a few like that, says Blangy, especially along the coasts of Africa and Tunis. Most of the time there is something that won’t go—rudder, tiller-rope, steering-gear, condenser, pistons, or boilers; one repairs as one can. For the rest, there are storms for which the submarines don’t care a hang, but which keep the poor old trawlers in port. So you can see just what our anti-submarine service amounts to.

Fortunately the papers say that in three months not one German U-boat will be left, we have sunk so many! Blangy is not of this opinion, nor Fourgues either, nor I. I can write you this, dear old bean, for I have a sort of an idea you think the same. We are not officials, we four! Blangy says I’m to send you greeting, and he laughed when I told him that on you, a navigating officer, they had played the same trick as on him, putting you behind a gun instead of on the bridge. He hopes that you will also get a trawler or anything else that will let you navigate. He is satisfied in spite of his misadventures on his rotten raft. He feels that he is living. His fever and rheumatism have left him, and he asks for nothing but the opportunity to rake a submarine, unless it’s the other way round!

Having bored you enough with Blangy, I will return to the adventures of the Pamir from Mudros as far as Algiers—that is to say, for the last month and a half. You may be surprised to have me write so soon and I’ll tell you why at once. We picked up at sea the crew of the cargo-boat Mer-Morte, of the same company as ourselves, which had been torpedoed the night before. In one of the boats was Villiers, engineer of the Mer-Morte, and the owner allowed Fourgues to keep him on board. That being the case, I passed half my work over to him—the engine, that is—and I have a little more time. I can write you more—at least, if it doesn’t bore you, in which case you have only to say so.

You remember that I wrote of the Pamir lying idle at Mudros with a cargo for a lot of different military units. The shipment had not yet reached its destination because we arrived in the midst of moving. Everyone was breaking camp—everywhere, Gallipoli or Asia. Some were returning to France, others going to Egypt, the majority bound for Salonica, for the army of the East, and no one to tell us what to do with our three thousand tons and our six cases of aeroplanes. Fourgues went to see the French Admiral, then the English Admiral, then the French Base Commandant, then the English Base Commandant, and all the authorities. Everybody said, “The Pamir? The Pamir? Three thousand tons? Munitions of war? Six aeroplanes? What to do with you? You are asking for orders?”

“What good does it do,” said Fourgues, “to have Admirals and Base Commandants in the countries where things are happening if they aren’t capable of acting on their own responsibility and must ask for orders from Paris for a poor little bark of three thousand tons?” Of course, the orders didn’t come. They have other fish to fry in Paris and London. We should still be there if one fine evening Fourgues hadn’t said at dinner:

“Get up steam, sonny, and we’ll start at dawn with to-morrow’s convoy. We’ll go to Salonica. They must be needing the stuff there, for it seems that the army of the East is going into Bulgaria. After the Pamir has left Mudros they can’t catch us because they haven’t given us any wireless and at Salonica we shall see what we shall see!”

He was as good as his word. The Pamir set out the next day, getting behind four big hookers that were leaving the barrage and nobody said a word. Fourgues was chuckling on the bridge.

“You see, the French Admiral thinks that I have orders from the military Base Commandant; the Commandant thinks that I have orders from the Admiral; between the two of them they would have let my cargo rot, whereas to-morrow General Sarrail will be dashed pleased to get it.”

Perhaps he was right. Perhaps, though, when they saw the Pamir put out, the Admiral and the Base Commandant were only too glad to be rid of the old grouser and said to themselves that they hoped he would go and hang himself somewhere else. Fourgues said that it would be a lesson to him, and that henceforth when the authorities had no orders to give him, he should give them to himself, because it was disgusting to let the shareholders make a thousand or fifteen hundred francs a day for doing nothing.

The Pamir got into Salonica the next morning after kicking around half the night in front of the harbour defences. None too soon the French Admirals have begun to put nets at the entrances of harbours, instead of leaving them as at the beginning of the war when the submarines had only to come in. I tell you, old man, the Germans discovered this before we ever thought of it, and the Austrians, too, in their North Sea, Adriatic, and Baltic ports; and they will discover many other things in which we shall be six months or a year behindhand. The thing that takes my breath away is that I chatted with not a few young sailors of your Navy and they all see it clearly. When I say young, I mean fellows between thirty and forty-five, the kind the English have already dubbed old fogies! In the French Navy these old fogies haven’t the right to an opinion, but nevertheless they see. It can’t be said that they are ignorant of their profession, having followed it for eighteen or twenty years; nor can it be said that they aren’t capable of commanding, because in England men of their age are already commanding a squadron or a Naval Base, and any day one can see an old French Naval lieutenant of forty-five with three stripes going to ask for orders of a young English Admiral of forty-two with three stars. The contrary never happens. Does that mean that the French are not as clever as the English? Tell me if you agree, or if, after your experience of the Navy, you think that the French Admirals are not anxious to rejuvenate the higher ranks? I should like to tell you now all I think about it and what Fourgues thinks too, but I see that my letter has not dealt fully yet with the adventures of the Pamir and so I must wait for another time.

It happened that our stuff was jolly welcome at Salonica. The Army people fell upon our necks as though we were their saviours. Guns, gun-carriages, picks and shovels, and everything else that the Pamir had—there was none too much of all this in Macedonia, it seems, especially as all ships are dealt with in the same haphazard way as we are. There are hundreds of thousands of tons to be moved from one point to another and nobody dares act on their own responsibility because all war-supplies come under the jurisdiction of G.H.Q. in France, and the Quartermaster-General isn’t here and doesn’t give any orders, but if anyone on the spot does give any he doesn’t like it and commands the exact opposite, and there’s no getting along with a system like that. So you can imagine how they admired Fourgues for having brought his three thousand tons without anyone having to ask for them. They unloaded us in a jiffy and the aeroplanes were especially welcome. No one knew where the devil they could have vanished to. The other six, which the Pamir left at Marseilles, had been sent in a hurry back to the French front, where there is so much breakage and where it seems aeroplanes are needed more urgently than in the Army of the East, which is only a side-show of the war. But the six we had hooked around—no one at Salonica appeared to know what had become of them, yet they were much needed, for the Fokkers and the Taubes came practically every day and there were none too many chaser-planes. That’s what ours were. We stayed at Salonica five days, and at the end of three those chaser-planes had already gone up and peppered the Bulgarians. This time Fourgues was satisfied and he said to me:

“See here, young feller, I begin to understand this war. There are two kinds of people: the Form-fillers, administrative species, who have the authority and who let the poilus be killed administratively and the boats sunk administratively. When the Forms have all been filled in and their responsibility well covered up, they rub their hands and don’t care a damn for anybody. And then there are the others: folks like you and me and some millions of poor devils. We drudge and wear out our skins without needing to fill up any Forms, but we are the ones that keep the business going and who will win the war. No one thanks us, but if France keeps her end up, it is because of us in the ships and the trenches. On land they haven’t yet managed to get heavy artillery like the Germans, so where the Boches send a shell of large calibre, we put a poilu and the blood of our poilus compensates for the inferiority of our artillery. At sea it’s the same thing, except that the submarine takes the place of the heavy artillery, and the ships which go to the bottom take the place of the poilus who get dished. All that isn’t good copy for the newspapers, but it’s the truth just the same. It will go on and on, but in the end we shall be obliged to do as the Germans do instead of scoffing at them.”

Fourgues is generally right, and the things he says come to pass six or eight months later, so when you tell him he is a pessimist, he has only to say, “Wait and see!” And when his predictions are realized, the people who said they never would be have forgotten what he told them in the first place, and they brag of how they had been predicting this for a long time! Then he gets into a rage and announces some more things which astonish them and they repeat that it can’t be so because the newspapers are saying quite the opposite. Five or six months later, behold Fourgues again in the right!

Have you noticed this, you on your Auvergne? Once in a while one has a true, honest, real tip—as, for example, when Fourgues or I tell things that we have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears on the Pamir in Archangel, or Norway, or England, or somewhere else. Not jokes, but things like “two and two make four” and “two hands have ten fingers.” Well, then, Fourgues and I spin our little yarns when we are asked to, as though it might interest people and as though they wanted to know the truth. God bless you, not a bit of it! The higher placed they are, the less they want to know the truth. When you have told them something they know is true, they answer, “Whatever you do, do not repeat this! We must not make the public anxious!” One would ask nothing better than to hold one’s tongue provided the people in high places do whatever is necessary to remedy the evils they say must be kept dark. But when you see that it’s not at all in order to put things right quietly, that they order you to hold your tongue, but only that they may sit with their arms folded doing nothing while those who are not informed imagine that everything is being done—well, old fellow, it’s pretty rank!

Or else these same official people don’t know that what you tell them is true—don’t know it officially, that is. So there’s no point trumpeting it into their ears. They listen to nothing, hear nothing, do nothing. Fourgues told at Mudros, at Salonica, and at other places the stories Flannigan told him in Trondhjem about the kind of submarine warfare the Germans were preparing for us. As he has an unholy memory for details, he repeated things from the German papers, with figures and all particulars. Well! All the Naval chiefs made fun of him as they did in the Fleet a year and a half ago. When he spoke of the Cressy, the Hogue, the Aboukir, the Lusitania, the Bouvet, the Ocean, the Gambetta, and all the others that have gone down, they answered that it was pure accident; that the Germans couldn’t do anything more because their submarines had been sunk—that all measures had been taken, that in less than six weeks the war at sea would be over, and that it was only necessary to read the papers! Whereupon Fourgues, somewhat astonished, pointed to the papers where the heading “Maritime News” is printed with one or two blank columns beneath. But when he assumes that these columns hide something, he is told that he is a coward and a panic-monger. Then he gets furious and holds his tongue for fear of saying too much. But he confides to me that with pudding-heads like that to look after things at sea, with those on the ships too old and those in the Ministries indifferent, we can expect anything of the Germans who won’t beat about the bush. He says it’s lucky for those who direct the English and French Naval affairs that the public understands nothing about it, otherwise they would get it in the neck in Parliament as the Army blokes did and we should be taking precautions instead of heading for catastrophes.

But I am wandering from the Pamir. When we had emptied out our stuff, the military authorities found it necessary to send a lot of colonials back to Algiers—Arabs and Soudanese who had been in the East almost a year and were dying with the cold. At Salonica there was none but the Pamir ready for the voyage—all the other boats were waiting to be unloaded. So we took on three hundred Africans. They didn’t give much trouble, poor devils, what with their shivering and seasickness. They asked only one thing—to be let alone. All we had to do was to give them bread and water twice a day. They swallowed a little and sicked it up the rest of the time.

From Salonica to Algiers we followed the secret route indicated by the French and English Admiralties. Fourgues took it, not for security, but for a joke.

“What will you bet, my boy?” he said when he had traced the track on his chart. “Will you make a bet with me?”

“I should like to, Skipper, but about what?”

“Well, look here! The Pamir is going to follow this highly secret route from Salonica to Algiers. Therefore, the Boches aren’t acquainted with it; therefore, it’s protected against submarines; therefore, we are required to follow it—isn’t that so?”

“But I don’t see——”

“What will you bet that before we get in the Pamir will either be torpedoed on this route—which we are ordered to follow—or that we pick up the lifeboats of some boat that has been torpedoed? Are you on?”

“Before making the bet, I want to know why. For, of course, it is not for nothing that we are sent out on a safe, secret, and protected course.”

Fourgues was fairly hugging himself. He wouldn’t explain, but he said:

“If I lose, I’ll stand you a box of cigars. If I win, you’ll take two middle watches for me.”

“I will, indeed, but why?”

“I’ll tell you afterwards.”

He wouldn’t give in and there was no explanation, but the old fox was right! Between Malta and Algiers we came upon the lifeboats of the Mer-Morte which had been torpedoed fifteen hours before.

We discovered them early, at about half-past six in the morning. I had the watch. Fourgues said to me when he knocked off at four:

“Don’t leave the secret route, eh, my boy? At exactly five o’clock turn to the west—you’ll see—at the point I have marked on the chart with a pencil. At that point the secret routes from north, south, east, and west cross each other. It’s a most interesting spot. All boats pass there. We’ll go that way.”

I made it just as close as I could. There was a nice little following breeze from the east rolling us about a bit, as we were in ballast. The Africans were vomiting desperately in the corners and we couldn’t see a hundred yards.

I had been going due west for almost an hour and a quarter and had just lit a cigarette to keep myself awake, when the lookout at the masthead shouted:

“Wreckage two points to starboard!”

I looked and could see nothing, but nevertheless I put the helm over and steered as the lookout had said, when he began to sing out again:

“More wreckage right ahead at three hundred yards!”

There was no need to call Fourgues. He leaped from his cabin to the bridge with his field-glasses and made out two lifeboats before you could wink.

“That’s all right, my boy! There are two boats, quite full. We’ll get them. I take the watch and you go aft to pick the poor fellows up. Have wine and coffee and blankets heated. They must have been there ever since last night and are probably soaked with a choppy sea like this.”

Fourgues handled the ship beautifully, and in five minutes we got the men aboard, although the two lifeboats had drifted five hundred yards apart. He put her to windward of them so well that they were in calm water, and as there were only sailors and not a lubber in the lot, they came up the ladder at once. They were drenched. I sent them to dry in the boiler-room, and after they had drunk their coffee and hot wine they slept the whole day and were as fresh as paint by night.

There was only one officer, the engineer Villiers of whom I have already spoken. We put him to bed at once in Muriac’s cabin and were a bit scared about him as he was delirious all the way to Algiers. A shell had burst in the engines of the Mer-Morte, smashing a cylinder and killing two men, and he doesn’t yet know how he ever came out of it. However, he got better a couple of days ago, and here is the story he told us:

The Mer-Morte left Toulon with a cargo of shells, gun cartridges, explosives, and all that sort of thing for the Army of the East. As usual, no wireless, no guns, nothing—just like ourselves. The Company won’t pay and the Navy thinks it a joke. She took the secret route from Toulon to Salonica, the same as the Pamir, only in the opposite direction. They were told that the route was guarded from one end to the other. “That story is all right for civilians!” said Villiers. “It would take at least a thousand boats to guard the route from Toulon to Salonica and there aren’t a hundred on the whole Mediterranean.” I ought to add that the Mer-Morte has been knocking about almost as much as the Pamir since the beginning of the war, particularly in the Mediterranean, and that Villiers thinks about things much the same as Fourgues and I, and says that his skipper, who went down with the ship, poor fellow, thought the same way, too. All the same it’s a joke that the people who do the real work of the sea think alike on the subject of the German submarine and say it isn’t a bluff, while the land-lubbers and the papers and the Ministers all tell us not to worry because it’s going to be over in two weeks. Which two weeks? Villiers thinks it’s a pretty bad joke, having just been through it, and although he is only an engineer and not a navigating officer, he said things which Fourgues considered quite true.

To return to Villiers’ story. The Mer-Morte, with her five thousand tons of projectiles and other munitions, followed the secret route to the spot where they were to head east for the Malta channel. She had not met a single patrol or guard. This was no surprise to Villiers, for he knows that patrolling is impossible. He asked us if the Pamir had met any patrols from Salonica to Algiers, and Fourgues drew down his lower eyelid: a good answer! That did not surprise Villiers either. He told us all this in port, and you know that when a fellow has just escaped death, has lost his skipper, his first officer, ten men, his ship, five thousand tons of shells and barely missed going with them, you really do listen to what he says a little more carefully than to the rot the land-lubbers talk.

So the Mer-Morte came that evening to the turning-point in the route. There, a submarine emerged five or six hundred yards behind her and fired a blank shot to stop her. The commander of the Mer-Morte was A1, copper-bottomed. As he had five thousand tons of munitions on board, he thought he must not let himself be sunk, because they were needed by the Army of the East; so he sent an order to Villiers in the engine-room to fire up for all he was worth and keep her at top speed for half an hour, when, as night was falling, he would be able to shed the submarine. Villiers did all he could and the Mer-Morte got up to eleven knots and a half. But the U-boat was faster than that and gained on the Mer-Morte and sent some shots into her. The Mer-Morte was no more armed than the Pamir and couldn’t reply. The skipper, seeing that he would be sunk, thought he would try to sink the submarine, so he came about and headed for it. You know what that was like—like an infantryman against a machine-gun. The submarine waited a little, then sent two shells on to the bridge, killing the skipper, his first officer and the others, and two more right into her hull near the water-line, which shattered the engine and boilers, and nearly killed Villiers.

So the Mer-Morte had to stop—no captain, no steam—a wreck. The submarine stood by and sent over an officer in a dinghy, who came aboard her. Villiers had gone on deck with all the crew who had not been killed. He was not yet delirious. The submarine officer knew French well and was very polite.

“You are to launch your lifeboats and put the crew into them. You, sir, will please accompany me to the bridge. Oh, we saw! We killed the commander and a watch-keeping officer. Our gunner is very good. But there’s something on the bridge that I must see.”

Villiers followed him. The officer was accompanied by two sailors armed with revolvers and the submarine stood close by with her gun trained on them. He went to the chart-house and looked at the chart of the Mediterranean, upon which the skipper of the Mer-Morte had traced the secret route from Toulon to Salonica. He compared this with a chart which he had brought with him from the submarine. When he saw that they matched, he said to Villiers:

“That’s all right. We know where all the boats go; our spies have not misinformed us. With secret routes like this we are sure of not losing time because you all go the same way. The patrol-boats are not very numerous, as you may have noticed; when there are any we stay out of range and come up again when they are gone. That simplifies our job.”

Villiers was astounded, but the other was very polite and smiled.

“Oh, it wasn’t by chance! Our boat was waiting for the Mer-Morte, which left Toulon the day before yesterday, at night-fall, with five thousand tons of munitions for the Army of the East. The same day the Saint-Artémise left with coal for Bizerta, the Jeanne-Marguerite with coal for Navarin, and the battleship Lyon for Malta. They all passed this way during the day. We saw them and let them go. We don’t work except when there’s no risk and when it’s worth while. Five thousand tons of munitions! We are very well informed, and then these secret routes make things so much more convenient!”

When he had finished carefully consulting the charts of the Mer-Morte, the Boche handed Villiers an account-book with counterfoils and asked him to sign it:

“It’s for our accounts and our part of the prize-money,” he said. “Of course, we should be believed if we said we had sunk a vessel, but it is better to have the signature of one of the officers. It’s more certain. In Germany, it’s not the same as it is with you. The more we destroy at sea, the more they pay us. We don’t make war for fun. So this little affair of the Mer-Morte, with her five thousand tons of munitions, is worth ten thousand marks to my commander, five thousand to me, and a thousand to each of the men of the crew of my boat. Nice, eh? Ah! I advise you to get into your lifeboats at once and row hard. I’m going to put bombs in the forward hold, and by gum, within a quarter of an hour there will be some first-class fireworks!”

Villiers said he supposed he would at least allow the crew to take some provisions and wine and clothing, as the lifeboats might be long at sea.

“What’s the use of that? We are not savages,” answered the Boche; “all the boats pass this way. There are some carrying nothing of importance passing within twenty-four hours—the Creuse, the City of Birmingham, the Pamir, the Santa Trinita. We shan’t do anything to them—there are others more interesting. We are well informed! Among those four there will surely be one to pick you up!”

Villiers got off in the lifeboat and they rowed as hard as they could against the wind. The Mer-Morte blew up twenty minutes later. He had time to embark all the fellows that had been killed and we buried them in Algiers. But he had held up as long as he could. Toward midnight the cold, the wet, thirst, and all that he had been through, made him delirious, and when we arrived he had to have a rope under his arms and be hoisted aboard—he had collapsed.

He is almost well now. We reached Algiers the day before yesterday and put ashore the Arabs of the Army of the East, who will tell this story in their huts. Fourgues and I are going with Villiers to-morrow to see the military authorities and leave a written report and make a verbal one of the affair of the Pamir and the Mer-Morte. I will write you later. The mail-boat for France leaves soon and we don’t know what the Pamir is going to do. Good-bye, old man. I hope Villiers is going to stay on the Pamir. Then I can write you more often.

Salonica,
March 13, 1916.

Dear old Man,

You’ll never guess what the Pamir trundled up here? Firewood, just plain firewood! To be sure, there are lots of other things on top, but it’s mostly firewood. It appears that this commodity is scarce in France and every other country, and as in the Army of the East they had about as much as I have on the back of my hand, we brought two thousand tons. But I am anticipating. Let us return to Algiers where I left you after we had picked up the castaways of the Mer-Morte.

The authorities of the port received us coolly. Villiers, Fourgues, and I told our tale and handed in our written statements for the Admiralty. It was all as clear as daylight, but they looked rather black. They asked Villiers a lot of questions about the route, the ship’s movements, the hour when the submarine turned up, where the officer came on board, where the Mer-Morte went down—and Lord knows what else. Do you see it? Villiers was in the engine-room attending to his boilers and pistons. He answered that he didn’t know what took place during that time and that he had put in his written report all that he knew of the business. He said that he was the engineer and not a watch-keeping officer. But they didn’t like it. As I understood the thing, the Mer-Morte ought not to have been torpedoed just at that spot. No matter where else and nothing would have been said, but there—no!

I had an explanation of this the day after, knocking around on shore with a little midshipman in the cipher department, who had some inside information. He told me that the place where the Mer-Morte was sunk is just where the commands of two Admirals meet. So, you see, as there is some sort of a squabble between them, the patrol-boats of one don’t go into the sphere of action of the other, and vice versa. If a patrol-boat thinks there is something to chase and chases it into the other zone, both Admirals get after it and, so, of course, nobody goes outside his own zone any more. The Admirals have their boats where they can get at them and so good tramps are torpedoed.

Well, Fourgues, who isn’t an engineer, but who knows what navigation means, made an awful row. He said that with a system of secret routes which the Germans learn in twenty-four hours, we might just as well give up, and that if they were determined at any price to have a particular route for cargo boats, they should at least indicate a different one for each. As the submarines can’t be everywhere at once, all that’s necessary is to have the cargo boats widely scattered, for having only one route for all of them is the way to get the greatest number sunk. They told him to hold his tongue, saying that as this particular secret route had been discovered, the Naval authorities would find a new one, and as it was the best method ascertained by competent persons, there was nothing for him to do but conform.

Then Fourgues said that wireless could hurt no one, cost almost nothing to put in, and would at least permit those ships whose dynamos were not stopped by the first shot of shell or torpedo to call for help. They answered that all these questions were being considered, but it was not as simple as he seemed to think. After that, he asked to be given guns, one forward and one aft, so that if the Pamir were attacked by submarine we could do more than say our prayers and add Amen. That was when they fairly jumped on him. My word! For they retorted that if he didn’t wish to go to sea any more, he had only to say so; for they had other things to do besides putting guns on old tubs like the Pamir and that the authorities were giving these problems an attention which did not need to be solicited by captains of the Merchant Service.

I wish you could have seen Fourgues’ face while they were rubbing it in. He went from white to brick-red.

“It’s the same old story!” was what he said as we came out. “All the land-lubbers think we are afraid. As if I cared a blast about losing my life! But when the Pamir goes down, it will make three thousand tons the less. And not by putting blank spaces in the Maritime columns of newspapers can they rebuild those three thousand tons!”

As for me, I am beginning to believe that as far as the wireless and guns are concerned, Fourgues is more than right. But there has been no time to reflect on all this because the local press and the civil authorities have made the very devil’s own fuss over the affair of the Mer-Morte and the Pamir. Old man, I’ve had my biography in the papers of the town and you’d never believe what a wonderful chap I am. They interviewed me after Fourgues and Villiers, and hurrah for the heroism of our sailors, the mastery of the sea, German submarine bluff, and the efficacious protection exercised by the Allied Admiralties over our fleets! No doubt of it, when they want to knock the public, the Censor fairly lets the papers rip. Well, they invited all three of us to a municipal banquet. The chief Naval Officer came with an aide-de-camp, and all the swells were there. We were given the feed of our lives. When they came to the toasts, the Mayor, the Port-Captain, and the President of the Chamber of Commerce got off a lot of rubbish they had collected from morning papers. They know almost as much about the sea as I know about painting in oils.

But the one who took the bun was the Naval Brass Hat, who spoke one before last. During the afternoon he had blackguarded Fourgues as though he were a cabin-boy and refused to transmit any of the requests Fourgues made. The same evening when the champagne appeared, he fairly buttered him up.

“I drink,” he said, “to gallant Captain Fourgues, whose presence of mind and whose seamanship have once more proved to the Germans how vain are their alleged defeats inflicted on the Naval supremacy of the Allies! An accident is in no sense a defeat. I can state officially that precautions have been taken. Captain Fourgues will not again find a case like that of the Mer-Morte!”

I was struck dumb. Fourgues replied. You know that when he wants to he can speak better than I can spit. But I saw his beard was moving in a way peculiar to him, and he was creasing the tablecloth with his finger-nails. I wondered what on earth he was going to say to the crowd of them, but I needn’t have been anxious.

“Thank you,” he said. “I am a sailor, and do not speak well except on board my ship. Thank you!”

And then he sat down. Simply that and nothing more. Well, old man, there’s nothing in being able to make speeches, for they nearly brought the house down, the big bug made most noise of all. After this flourish the meeting broke up.

The inhabitants had prepared a vocal and instrumental concert with the assistance of local artists, and I lit a cigar while they made me repeat for the fiftieth time the adventure of the Pamir and the Mer-Morte. It seems the newspapers are not sufficient for the colonists in this country; however, one must be polite and I was doing my level best, all the time keeping my eye on Fourgues, who was talking in a corner with the aide-de-camp of the Naval Brass Hat who was tapping him on the shoulder as though he were telling him a good joke. But I could see that Fourgues was finding it anything but funny. He chewed the end of his cigar without having lit it and kept his hands in his pockets, which is a trick he has to keep himself from gesticulating too much when he is mad. When the aide-de-camp left him, he came straight over to me and said:

“Let’s get out of this, or I shall explode!”

I should have preferred to stay, because it’s really rather flattering to be treated like a hero; but Fourgues pulled me by the sleeve and we hooked it from the crowd of swells.

On the way back to the Pamir, he pondered a long time. He would stop and then go on again. I followed and said not a word. Finally he let it all out:

“Do you know what he told me, that gold-braided humbug? He said that as I had no confidence in the way the sea was patrolled and was afraid of submarines, they were going to load the Pamir with firewood for the Army of the East. In that way, he said, if a submarine rakes you or torpedoes you—which is improbable—you will float, my dear Fourgues—you will float—because wood is lighter than water. Because wood is lighter than water, because wood is——”

I believe Fourgues repeated it fifty-one times, his arms folded, and fairly snorting, he was so wild.

When we were on board, he offered me a glass of old brandy from his home to make up for the liqueurs he had made me miss, and a cigar, a Havana from salvage stock, which was not bad at all. And then he didn’t open his mouth again, but started trying to read his fortune cards to see if the Pamir would be sunk or not before the end of the year. All his attempts failed and he wasn’t satisfied at all. Finally he counted the cards and saw that one was missing, the nine of clubs, which he found in the card-box. So he chucked them all into the air and sent me to bed.

“Only, my boy,” he said, “as they are giving us two thousand cubic metres of wood to carry to keep us from sinking, do me the favour of pinching a few feet of it. We’ll make some rafts. If they won’t give me wireless or guns, that’s that. I can’t buy them in a bazaar, but if a submarine sends a torpedo amidships, I don’t intend that we shall all go to feed the crabs. Do you twig?”

I answered that I did, and went into our quarters where Villiers had just arrived from the spree ashore. He was a trifle mellow as everybody had insisted on drinking with him, but at bottom he’s a good fellow, for he is staying on board the Pamir and I shan’t have to bother with the engine any more. If he had wanted, the office would have given him some leave after the sinking of the Mer-Morte, but he said that when one had had an escape like that, there was nothing more to be afraid of and that he would be a mascot for the Pamir. The office paid all his losses promptly—which fairly astonished me—but didn’t increase his pay a cent.

Villiers has had more technical training than Muriac, who began at sixteen as a fireman on a coasting vessel and knew his engine as he knows his own pocket, without having a word of theory. Villiers went through the school of the Arts et Métiers and bores us stiff at meals with rot about Carnot’s law, the conservation of energy, and thermodynamics. Some days Fourgues looks askance at him, not liking to have people on the boat who know more than he, on no matter what subject. But he can’t say anything. Villiers, in spite of his somewhat affected manner, runs his show to perfection. He told me that he arrived just in time; otherwise the steam steering-gear, the condenser, and the boilers would have gone bust. I can well believe it. As long as the machinery keeps going, I am able to boss the job. But if it had begun to jib, I shouldn’t have known what the deuce to do.

At Algiers we loaded two thousand cubic metres of firewood. It is easy to stow—throw it in the hold and it settles itself. It isn’t dirty; you can be sure it won’t break. Fourgues himself found that on the whole it was as good as coal as a cargo. It was to warm the poilus of the Army of the East and we were ready to start, but at the last moment they told us to go and complete our cargo in France and ordered us to Cette. Fourgues tried to say that at Cette they’d probably have little for him to take and that the Pamir would lose eight days, during which the soldiers would be shivering with cold at Salonica. But as he was already on poorish terms with the Naval authorities, because of his talk of guns, wireless, and so on, they told him they had had enough of him and ordered him to go to Cette without giving any more trouble.

At Cette the fellows looked sick when they saw that we were more than three-quarters full. They shoved barrels of wine on top of our firewood. It took a day to level the logs of pine and elm. We were able to load two tiers in each hold, enough to keep the Army of the East drunk for three days only, and we got through without too much breakage—only three or four old casks which stove in while they were in the sling, and the crew fairly howled when they saw that good wine going overboard for the benefit of the fish! Just as we were on the point of sailing, there arrived from Cette a consignment of mules which had come from the Pyrenees for the soldiers in the East. They were to have embarked on a boat specially fitted for that sort of thing—only, the boat had been sunk two days before and there was a fearful fuss because General Sarrail was raising Cain to get mules. At the very moment we were weighing anchor, a fellow from the port ran back, signalling with his arms to us to stop. Fourgues had the ladder let down and the chap came on board and asked how many mules we could take. Old man, it was worth paying for to see Fourgues’ face.

“Mules, sir, mules! So the Pamir is a —— stable now, is she? I am full to bursting, sir! I have big logs and little logs and elm logs and other logs. And I have two hundred barrels of wine, which, at the rate at which things are moving, will be vinegar before I arrive. And I have strict orders to get under way for Salonica at four o’clock, sir, and now you want to know how many mules I can take! Oh, as many as you wish, sir! Put them on the deck—in the funnels—in the chain-locker—up the masts, and in my cabin, sir. Cut them in pieces and stow them in the hold and we will stick them together again at Salonica. It’s all the same to me! The sea is deep and we shan’t touch the bottom even if you load us with mules enough to founder us. We can pack your mules, sir, in tiers, two or three tiers; and if they can eat coal or firewood, perhaps they will still be recognizable as mules when they get to Salonica!”

I wish you could have seen the mug of the citizen with the mules! He would have crawled into the compass if that had been possible. He stammered excuses—urgent necessity, extremely urgent necessity, expected ship sunk, necessity of national defence, imperative order not to go ashore again until he had disposed of his mules on the Pamir.... When Fourgues saw that he had humbled him enough he suspended the order to get under way. Secretly he was enjoying it.

“Look here! I’ll take a hundred of your mules, sir; if you will bring enough hay for a week, for I’m not going to feed them on the bread of my crew. I will give them water from the boilers. That will cure those that are costive. But for G——’s sake get a move on! I don’t want to rot at Cette and I intend to sail to-morrow at five o’clock. But do your mules know how to swim, sir? Because, if the Pamir is torpedoed there’s no place for them in my two lifeboats. And if they are sick, I’ve no orderlies to hold basins for them!...”

The poor brute hooked it as soon as he could, and I am sure he is still wondering what strange monstrosity it was he stumbled upon. Villiers, who came up from the engine-room after Fourgues gave the order not to get under way, heard the last volley. But as soon as the muleteer had turned his back, Fourgues burst out laughing and gave each of us an Algerian cigar.

“That’s how we are on the Pamir, Villiers! Of course, I’ll take their mules, as many as there is room for on the deck. They are needed at Salonica. But all the same, they’re a bit thick—sending us that bird at the last moment! As for you, my boy, to-night you are going to have a wooden floor laid over the deck for all these quadrupeds. I don’t intend they shall break their legs on the steel deck. Have it ready by to-morrow morning at six.”

That’s the sort of man Fourgues is. He stayed up all night while the crew nailed those old planks that were left from our Moroccan Boches. At six o’clock everything was ready. We had made a fine floor with crossbeams underneath and with mangers along the railing. No one got any sleep. Villiers was all right. He calculated the length of the boards and crossbeams at once, the number of nails, the dimensions of the surface—everything. Without him we should have wasted stuff. If only we could have slept the next day! But the mules arrived with their hay at dawn and we went right on without stopping. Fourgues gave orders to serve wine ad lib., for, he said, with a little wine you can make a Frenchman climb to Heaven on a knotted rope.

Well, old man, in former times I have shipped horses, cattle, pigs, and asses on the Pamir, but I recommend mules if you want a little distraction. They have only four feet, but it seems as though they had twenty-five. When you put the girths around their bellies they begin to sniff and rear. When you start the winches and they are hoisted into the air, they are so astounded that they don’t say a word; they content themselves with relieving themselves because of the pressure on their bellies, but you can see by their sly expression and their panting breath that they are reserving themselves for later. And when they reach the deck and are out of the sling, they begin to dance, to run, and to let out a kick wherever they see a human face, and then it’s far from funny. We just missed having our eyes put out a hundred times, because there were a hundred mules. One jumped around so much that he went overboard. He knew how to swim and hooked it for the shore, and whatever may have been his adventures, the Pamir did not carry him along to Salonica.

The hay came too. Fourgues had it put on top of the deck-house near the funnel. It was as hard as wood and as dry as asbestos. We had to wet it before the mules could eat it. Two men from the crew were appointed to look after them, because there was no one provided at Cette to escort them. I am glad it was they and not me. For twenty-four hours they were unable to approach those mules who kept showing their heels and skipping like kids, so that the two reservists fled with the hay! But when the beasts began to get hungry, they all held out their noses for the hay when it came, and after a few days the movie-man and the croupier were chums with them. As none of the rest of the crew, Villiers and I included, could approach without seeing them wriggle their rumps, the movie-man and the croupier got swelled head and said that they were the only ones aboard who understood animals.

Fourgues, coming down from the bridge one night, wanted to approach them from starboard aft, whispering soft nothings to them in the language of Provence:

“There, there, my little dear, mon petit bichon——”

I should smile! Three of them sent their heels about two inches from his pipe and Fourgues hooked it faster than he would have thought possible. You can’t imagine the noise that a hundred mules can make on a steel deck, even with a wooden floor. There you have four hundred hoofs making the devil’s own rattle all night long, and there’s no way of going by-byes. Things went pretty well as far as Sardinia, because we had calm weather with a slight breeze; but from Malta to Matapan we ran into a wind from the North-West with a choppy swell in consequence. The hundred mules danced a hornpipe all together as we rolled and pitched, and their stamping drowned the noise of the wind. They brayed for all they were worth. The spray stung their eyes and got in their noses and they sneezed wretchedly. Add to this the two hundred barrels, loose in the hold, which went bim-boom! bim-boom! on top of the firewood and you see what a time we had from Cette to Salonica.

But it was all the same to me, for since Villiers has come I have nothing more to do with the engines. So I have six good hours a day in which to lounge in my cabin, playing the mandolin and reading your books. I have reached Suffren, Nelson, Villeneuve, and Trafalgar in the Naval History. Here is my conclusion: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The secret route was altered by the time the Pamir went from Cette to Salonica. Perhaps the sinking of the Mer-Morte was the cause of this. Fourgues and Villiers think so. All I know is that we didn’t have one patrol-boat between Cette and Point Cassandra. You who are on a warship—can you explain this to me? I suppose you protect the boats that are worth the trouble, although the Provence, which had more than a thousand men on board, caught it not long ago. Evidently boats loaded with mules, wine, and firewood are not worth the trouble, and I am the first to realize that this is true. I have had rafts made of the extra wood I pinched, and if the Pamir goes down we can hope to float. But I can quite understand that they shouldn’t bother about a tramp with a crew of only thirty-five men, and if you tell me that the others are guarded I’m satisfied.

At Salonica, Fourgues caught it, naturally. He was late with the wine, late with the firewood, late with the mules. It was some sort of Naval Captain, I’m not sure what, who came on board to tell us this. If you ever see him, he is a chap with a square jaw, big and strong as an oak, who doesn’t mince his words any more than Fourgues. So you can imagine what they said to each other. Fortunately Fourgues was able to show his papers quite in order and the other had to take it all back. They must be in crying need of wine, mules, and wood here, for they made us come alongside the principal quay of the Port Authority on the very evening of our arrival and we had unloaded all our cargo in three days. We were then sent to the outer harbour to wait for orders, and are now kicking our heels. It’s good for us, for we’ve all had about as much as we could stand, ever since Algiers.

I must have slept twenty-four hours at one stretch after the unloading of the Pamir, and now Fourgues, Villiers, and I go on land about three or four o’clock and come back when all the lights are out. What a dirty hole Salonica is! There are two or three cafés, all crowded. In the streets the policing is done by Greeks, French, and English, and one is about as agreeable as the other. And there is an exchange of eighteen or twenty per cent., and Fourgues says it is shameful that the French Government permits French paper to lose a fifth when it’s exchanged into Greek. And then everybody says there is no use having an Army of the East if the French G.H.Q. refuses it supplies, troops, guns, aeroplanes, and everything. I could write volumes if I told what I have heard here about the fix they are in. I had rather be on the Pamir than in General Sarrail’s shoes, and from what they say, he is pretty smart to have held on here against the Boches, the Austrians, the Bulgarians, and the Turks, without counting the Greeks at his back, and with such weak forces that if any general on the French front had been treated similarly he would have sworn by all the gods that his line was going to be pierced.

And in the meantime, old man, I am still a long way from La Rochelle, and I’m worried. It does no good for you to tell me that all is going well, that everything is moving, that it will soon be over—all that doesn’t help with my affairs. There you are on the Auvergne, well tied up snug in a harbour, and I think you are quite right to be there, for there is no use needlessly exposing battleships which cost eighty millions of francs and carry twelve hundred men. Not that your battleships are much good either—and I’ll tell you later what Fourgues thinks about that. At present there are only two things that count, according to my way of thinking—the Boche submarines and the merchant vessels which provision the Allies. All the rest is all my eye. Only, the Allied Admirals are neither on the German submarines nor on the merchant vessels. So they play to their heart’s content with code-telegrams while the ships that go sailing by are being torpedoed. But Fourgues’ cards say that the Pamir won’t be torpedoed this year. As the war ought to be over before 1917, the rest doesn’t matter.

Good-bye, old man. Send me your photograph in sub-lieutenant’s uniform and don’t look haughty when it’s taken. We are putting at least as much into this on the Pamir as on the Auvergne, where I send you a hearty handshake.

Bilbao,
April 27, 1916.

Dear old Man,

We are here to get iron. You know it’s good in this country, and we haven’t any left in France. But I will start again at Salonica where I left off.

They had no idea what to do with the Pamir down there. We should be there yet if Fourgues had not annoyed all the big bugs of the Navy so that they told him at last to get out and go to Malta, on chance, where there might be something for us to do.

We left in ballast, nothing in the hold and a few passengers, young fellows from nineteen to twenty-five years of age who were leaving Salonica to finish their higher education in Spain, Switzerland, or Holland.

All these young people were very pro-French and Venizelist, and Fourgues was astonished at their going away from Salonica to study elsewhere than in France, especially as they said with tremendous gestures that the hour of Venizelos was about to strike and that he would at last espouse the cause of the great and generous nation which—who—of whom—and so on and so forth—and that they should form an army in Greece to fight at our side and that Greece would come into her own again.

Fourgues chatted with them in order to pump them and after a while he understood.

“You see,” he said, “these tender hearts are skipping out of Salonica because they are afraid they will be obliged to enlist if Venizelos organizes an army. They are, as we say, brave, but not rash! They don’t go into French territory because they think they might be called back, whereas in a neutral country they will be perfectly safe. I don’t know whether the ancient Greeks were as brave as the historians say, but those of to-day look to me like heroes, in the sense that they love to see others fighting.”

During the trip from Salonica to Malta we actually met some patrol-boats off the coast by Matapan; the rest of the time—search me! I wonder why there are people who ask what good it does for us to be at Salonica. Such idiots ought to go down there and see how, if we had no one there to keep Constantine’s mouth shut, Sophie’s husband would have handed his country over to the Boches long since and opened all his ports to their submarines.

And that would be a pretty business! Now that the submarines are already hard at it—no matter what people say or don’t say—you can see what it would be like if they could make use of the Greek ports and islands. There would no longer be any way of getting through down there; the route to Egypt and India would be cut and we should practically give the Boches all that side of the map.

At Malta we arrived in the nick of time, but as the English don’t like to have their ports too crowded, they told the French Mission to get the Pamir out of the way at once. As no one knew what to do with us, they sent us to Bizerta where they said that perhaps we might find orders. We left after one night in port, still empty, but the public pays the bill. There was one woman-passenger who arrived with a Gladstone at the last minute and begged us to take her. She was the wife of a lieutenant in the Navy, and as he had been with his ship, she had not seen him since August, 1914. Talk about adventures. Just listen to this:

Ever since the beginning of the war the cruiser of the little lady’s husband had rolled around, to Syria, Egypt, in the Indian Ocean, and other places, and she had remained with her family in a village in the Jura where she suffered acute anxiety to think of her husband so far away. She is the daughter of a ship inspector, who knows as little of navigation as I do of theology; on a boat she is like a fish out of water. By every mail her husband wrote to her to wait, that his cruiser would come nearer to France some day, and then he would let her know. The first of March she received a telegram from Port Said: “Going Malta ten days repairs come immediately.”

She received this in her mountains one hour before the train left which connected with the express for Marseilles. Taking just time to pack a bag, she started and reached Marseilles the next day, believing that it was only necessary to arrive on the quay in order to take the first boat, as in the Jules Verne story. All day long she trotted from the Cannebière to the Government Docks, asking everybody, Customs officers, police, sailors, etc., where one took the boat for Malta. She understands nothing whatever about steamship companies, time-tables, etc. Finally her cabman saw that she was not making any progress, so he took her to Naval Headquarters. She says she can’t tell an admiral from a station-master because their uniforms are so much alike; so you can see how they must have laughed at Headquarters when she said that she wanted to see her husband at Malta. Simply that and nothing more. In short, they explained to her that the mail-boat had left the evening before, and there would not be another for a week, so that she could not reach Malta for ten or eleven days. The little lady was beside herself. A man, you or I, would have said, “To Hell with it!” But I believe that when a woman gets it into her head to see her husband she would go all the way on her elbows rather than give up. She took the train for Italy and went the whole way round, Nice, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Reggio, the Strait, Messina, and Syracuse—three days and a half without stopping and third class because she was afraid her money would give out. She herself does not remember how she was able to fix things so as to have the passports and that sort of thing. All she remembers is that she showed all the authorities her marriage certificate and her husband’s telegram. They tried everywhere to stop her. Then she would start explaining and crying and it would end by her being permitted to go on. Add to this that she can’t even say bread in Italian! She ate as she could, afraid to get out of the train in a station for fear it would go off and leave her. It made no difference, she stuck it out and she reached Syracuse. The mail-boat was not starting for two days and she hadn’t enough cash left to pay for the passage. At the French Consulate they sent her away because she was neither a pauper nor anything else, nor was she on Government service. They told her to write home for money as the telegraphic money orders no longer exist, and that writing would take a week or more.

Only a woman could get herself out of such a fix. On her beam-ends in Sicily without a cent, unable to get anything from her husband or from home, and nevertheless to arrive in Malta—it’s a mystery to you and me who are, nevertheless, old hands at travelling. She pawned her gold watch and a ring with a stone; then she found out in some way that there was a sailing-vessel carrying cork and sulphur which would sail for Malta the next day. By this means she made a day, as the mail-boat stops at all the ports and the wind-jammer went straight across without a stop.

I should like to know how she humbugged the old Sicilian skipper to take her. Anyway, she brought it off. Besides she’s pretty, the minx, although she’s only about as big as a pat of butter and she knows how to use her eyes. She thinks and talks of nothing but her husband, but in order to get to him she knows very well how to smile and jolly people along. She says that with the Sicilian skipper she had only to point to her heart and the word “Malta” in the telegram and that that finished him! Well, I should like to have seen it.

At Malta she took a row-boat in order to make a tour of the port. She had never seen her husband’s cruiser and all that she knew of it was that it had three funnels, two masts, and a ram. She was sure of this much from a poor snap-shot she carried. So she pointed out to the boatman all the ships with three funnels and he went up to them. As the names are painted out since the war, she asked everywhere, “Is this the cruiser Bayard?” Then someone would explain that the Bayard was not at Malta; but she was afraid they were fooling her and kept on searching. Finally she was forced to see that the Bayard was not there. She was told that it had left three days before, but that in time of war no one knew where a ship went and that only the Admiral could tell her—if he happened to be in a good humour that day; unfortunately he was more apt to be abusive. That didn’t matter; she asked where she might see the Admiral! They laughed in her face, and told her that this Admiral was a bachelor and nothing enraged him more than to have his officers see their wives, because he said that war is war and peace is peace. Finally she had the name of the Admiral’s ship. Well, I should like to have seen the collision between the lady and the Admiral!

All she will tell is that he asked her if she was clean off her head, and said that her husband had done very wrong to telegraph his whereabouts and that he was going to give strict orders that such a thing must not occur again; that there was nothing for her to do but make for France at once; that it was useless to chase her husband over the “vasty deep” when the war would perhaps be over before she had caught up with him.

Fortunately, on leaving the ship, broken-hearted, she found an officer at the gangway to whom she said: “And you, monsieur, will you not tell me where the Bayard is?” The officer, whose job was to decode despatches, was a friend of her husband and did know. He took her quickly to his cabin in order that no one should hear them, and under seal of secrecy told her that the Bayard was at Bizerta for repairs, that it would remain there eight or ten days and she could catch it if there was a boat. All the regular service has stopped. There is nothing now but military ships or ships that have been taken into Government service and which must not take passengers. On these she could not go except by fraud and with serious risk, if, indeed, anyone would take her. But she said that no one could shoot her for that, and if they dragged her husband into it just because she went to look for him, she would make him hand in his resignation after the war and that was all there was about it! She doesn’t lose her bearings, this little lady! She had never seen the young officer, the despatch translator, but she simply annexed him. She borrowed a hundred francs from him at once in the name of her husband, and then she told him to inform her immediately of any boat, no matter what, that was leaving for Tunis. But the officer was obdurate, for he said if the Admiral found it out, he would put him under arrest without hesitation. The little lady must have given him the glad eye, for he gave in. And then she told him that she would take up her quarters herself with her bag on a seat in the Customs office for the night, so that the lieutenant wouldn’t have to run to a hotel, and so that she would be ready to jump into the first boat he pointed out to her.

In spite of his protests she did as she said and established herself in the Customs house. The officers wanted to put her out, but she froze on to a seat with her bag, and as she didn’t look like a dangerous criminal, they left her there and she slept with her head against the wall. In the morning one of the sergeants went to get her some tea and toast and she made her toilet in the office of the Customs men, as though she were at home. Just at this moment the sub-lieutenant from the Admiral’s ship came to tell her that the Pamir, having arrived the evening before, was to sail at eight that morning for Bizerta, but that the skipper of the Pamir was notorious for his disagreeable temper and that he would send her to the right-about. Much she cared! Ten minutes afterwards, as we were weighing anchor, she climbed our ladder, which was still down, bounded on to the bridge as though she had never done anything else all her life, and went straight up to Fourgues, for all the world like Jeanne d’Arc before the Dauphin. Fourgues made a face, and while she got off her little speech, assumed the expression he wears before a head wind. That would have been enough to silence me, but she went on and on! She begged, she smiled, and finally, as Fourgues kept on saying nothing and examining her from top to toe—but I could see his hands fidgeting behind his back as they do when he is enjoying himself—she burst into sobs, sat down on her bag, patted her eyes with a handkerchief the size of a nut, and kept saying over and over:

“How unhappy I am! Oh, how unhappy I am!”

Well, Fourgues took off his cap, went over to her, put his hand under her chin like a kind papa, and said:

“So it’s true, little girl, all this stuff that you have been telling me? Well, you’re in luck—there’s an empty cabin! Go and wash your face! I don’t want that fortunate husband of yours to think you are ill!”

Old man, she fell on his neck and hugged him! Fourgues let her do it and returned the favour. And then, tapping her on the cheek:

“It’s all right, little woman! I have a daughter of your age, and I only hope she’ll do half as much when she is married. And now, go and make yourself pretty and you can tell us all about it at luncheon—twelve sharp.”

Well, old man, we had the most charming trip—lady’s weather, bright sunlight, and that little woman radiating happiness from her hair to her heels. Her little bag was a proper bag o’ mystery; out of it she pulled ribbons, bits of lace, and all sorts of fal-lals, and when she came out of Blangy’s cabin at noon, you would never have believed it was the same person who had arrived in the morning with her hair coming down, wearing a shabby dust-coat. How we laughed at table when she told us her misadventures! Fourgues could hardly contain himself for joy.

She stayed on the bridge all the afternoon and I explained everything to her—the compass, the charts, the signal lights, the handling of the ship, and whatnot. She couldn’t have understood a thing, but she smiled and nodded her head. If I had spoken Chinese to her, she would still have smiled, she was so happy. That night at dinner, Fourgues seized the occasion to give Villiers and me a sermon on love, in order to encourage us to marry soon. Can’t you just hear him? He went through the whole gamut. As far as I am concerned I didn’t need so much—I’m only waiting for the chance. But Villiers tried to have him on and interposed all sorts of objections. And then the little lady took a hand and laid him out in five secs., and Villiers ended by confessing himself beaten and begging her to find him someone who resembled her as closely as possible. And so we were happy and on the best of terms. She went to bed and slept a full fourteen hours. When the Pamir reached Bizerta, about ten o’clock in the morning, she came out of her cabin as fresh as a rose, and by Jingo her sub-lieutenant of a husband must find her more agreeable at night than a cutting wind in his face in ugly weather! It happened that the Pamir was sent to Sidi-Abdallah, right where the Bayard was in dry-dock, and that we anchored close to land.

“There is your ship, little girl,” said Fourgues, “and your husband is on it. Greet him for me if you remember. And be assured nothing will happen to him. With a little wife like you he is under a lucky star!”

She trotted off without waiting for anything more—fairly dancing—just fluttering a good-bye with her finger-tips—except that she gave Fourgues another hug.

You must forgive me for having told you all this. But you see on the Pamir we have so few distractions and it was worth more than all the worries in the ports and the mooching around at sea. No doubt about it, that little woman had nerve! If everybody had as much the war would last six months less.

We had no time to find out what happened to her, for the Pamir was immediately packed off to Bilbao—still empty—which means that the Government will have paid the owners a voyage from Salonica to Bilbao for doing nothing. But that’s no business of ours, is it? We sail, we carry out orders—even when there aren’t any!

So we stopped at Sidi-Abdallah two days, just time enough to provision, and started for Bilbao, where the Pamir was to get iron ore. The voyage seemed rather dismal to all of us after the passage from Malta, and we spent the time going over what she had told us. Fourgues says it is stupid to forbid officers and men to telegraph where they are going. If it’s because they are afraid of leaks in the telegraph offices, they have only to employ people who are above suspicion, mobilize them, and bind them to secrecy; whereas, especially on the foreign lines, they still keep many who come from no one knows where and among whom there are evidently spies. But the Naval authorities, instead of getting rid of those who are no manner of use and who may let things out, prefer to imprison sailors who get drunk because the sailors can’t move and can be punished if they make any objection. That was the first point. He then said that it was pretty tough that in the Navy no one gets regular leave such as they have in the Army, and that it’s a good way to make the sailors grumble. And then, what advantage is there in repairing boats at Bizerta, where there is practically nothing in the way of a plant and no spare parts, instead of sending them to Toulon? The route to Bizerta and to Toulon is almost the same coming from the East and there’s no saving of coal, while all the material for repairs and refitting must be sent to Bizerta, as well as coal and everything else necessitating the employment of a lot of boats which cost their weight in gold like the Pamir. He says all this means delays of loading at Toulon and unloading at Bizerta. Whereas, if the battleships and cruisers went to Toulon, everything would be right there and at the end of railroad and telegraph lines. What with one thing and another, this little establishment must have cost some hundreds of millions without a single battleship having gained a day, while not a little material coming to it will have been sunk by submarines.

Speaking of submarines, we wish you would tell us how long they are going to keep up that farce of having the big ships sail in broad daylight on routes which are supposed to be secret but which all the Germans know. That they should send the Pamir and others of her class out to be sunk is comprehensible, because officially, of course, there is nothing to be feared from the submarine warfare; but battleships or cruisers which cost fifty and sixty millions with a thousand men on board—Fourgues thinks that’s a little too much. Here are his own words:

“It’s all very pretty,” he says, “to maintain that the German submarines are a joke. But it would be better to take common-sense precautions. I’m not a submarine officer, but I have seen several such officers, and they say that at night they can’t see anything through their periscopes and are obliged to navigate on the surface. Consequently they are much less dangerous at night. So there’s nothing to do but have the big war-vessels sail at night and hug the coast in the daytime, or better, anchor in port, especially in the Mediterranean, where there is no lack of coast or ports. The trips would take a little longer, but surely it’s worth it to save fifty millions of francs and a thousand men being sent to the bottom. It’s the same for the transporting of troops and material. To start with, I don’t understand why they make them start from Marseilles for Salonica, instead of from Taranto or Brindisi, the Italians being our Allies. That would make three or four days less on the water, that much less risk, and not a few millions saved. But if at any price they must go by sea, it’s a mystery to me why they don’t sail by day quite near the Italian, African, or Greek coasts. In the first place, there is less danger of being torpedoed, for the coasts are easier to patrol; and then, in case of torpedoing, there would frequently be time to beach the ship and she might be saved. The lifeboats would not be lost either. They would make the coast and the crews would be saved. It’s all childishly simple, but it would take the Devil himself to make the responsible people understand that war is not peace. When it is merely a matter of annoying one, the big bugs know well enough how to say that ‘war is war!’ but when it’s a matter of doing something, they prefer to cough up Forms and Forms and still more Forms! This submarine business is going to cost them dear. But, you know, my boys, when the ships begin to go down like ninepins, they’ll let up a yell and say that the Boches are pirates; that everything had been done that could be done, but no one knew they were as wicked as all that! Because the public and the Members of Parliament are in total ignorance, the big bugs will receive universal sympathy and will anoint themselves great men—while the boats keep on going down. After a year we’ll be in an unholy fix, to say nothing of the country having to tighten its belt because there will be no way of feeding it—steel and everything else short. The public will raise Cain, but as no one will really know how it came about and the Censor will keep on choking off all those like you and me who see what ought to be done, the submarines will clean us out completely.”

When he once starts in, Fourgues fairly lets rip. But Villiers thinks he is right and so do I, and sometimes we wonder if all these people haven’t gone balmy. Well, who lives will learn and we can die but once. If the Pamir goes down and we go to Davy Jones’ locker, at least we know whose fault it is.

We reached Bilbao after a bit of a shaking, from crossing in ballast and because as we ran up the coast of Portugal, the weather was awful. I will pass over the beastly trouble Fourgues had finding out where and how to get his ore. It looks as though the representatives France has here pass their time playing bridge instead of looking after their business. They must have sent down fellows whose friends at court keep them well out of danger and who prefer to have a good time at a safe distance from the front, but who know as much about tramp-steamers and materials as I do about the organ. And you should see how attentive the Spaniards are to the Germans and to all the Germans do down here. Practically the Boche is boss! The Huns know everything, see everything that sails, and inform their ambassador at Madrid, who must direct at least fifty thousand Boches with a nod of his head. There are Hun spies everywhere, but we haven’t any anywhere. Good Lord, it’s lucky for us that Germany’s geographical position in relation to the sea is what it is—in a sort of blind alley! Only to see how she has succeeded in making fools of us at the sea, at arm’s length, as it were, one can be certain that if we were in her place and she in ours, we should have been cleaned out long since and shouldn’t be getting an ounce of merchandise from outside.

Almost everywhere, down here, there are wireless stations and spy stations on the coast to inform the Boche submarines. They have only to listen and then go straight for their object. Neither Fourgues nor anyone else on board can understand the talk about stores of oil which the Germans, according to French papers, are keeping in neutral countries. They say that the Boches have supply-bases in Greece, Spain and elsewhere, and that without these they could not work as they do. That’s all sheer humbug. Every time anyone looks for these bases they aren’t to be found—because there aren’t any. The Boches carry as much as fifteen or twenty days’ supply in their submarines. People told us that in Bilbao, as they did in Norway last year. Well, then, will you tell me where they would need to get more? From Zeebrugge to the Mediterranean doesn’t take twenty days, and in the Mediterranean they have Pola and Cattaro, the Bulgarian coast and Constantinople, Syria, the points of Tripoli which have been retaken by the Turks, and those parts of Morocco that we haven’t got. No matter what they do, they are never more than three or four days from a friendly base, so they don’t need to go to the neutrals. We are making fools of ourselves, accusing the neutrals of things of which they aren’t guilty and which can’t be proved, when there are so many frightfully obvious things that we don’t dare mention. All this would be a joke if it didn’t prolong the war, but it will end by costing us dear.

Well, this time the Pamir doesn’t sail empty—she has three thousand tons of good ore which the Boches won’t get. We don’t know yet where we are going, but we shall hardly leave before a week, the loading is so slow.

And now, old man, shake hands! I hope we go to Bordeaux because at Bordeaux there’s a train for La Rochelle. Good-bye.

PART FOUR

Baltimore, U.S.A.,
July 16, 1916.

My dear old Man,

Isn’t it absurd that after two years’ interval I should again be passing the 14th of July in the United States? Only, this time you aren’t here and there’s not the slightest chance of our running into each other. I wonder if I should find you changed after all this time! Perhaps I shouldn’t know you any more now that you have shaved off your moustache in order to be like your brother-officers—you must have done it for swank, old man, since you got into the Navy List, but it won’t go down with me! Nor am I the skinny little chap you used to knock about to see if I could keep my end up. I have a beard like a missionary and my fiancée says that I have got stouter and that now I look like a man. So much for my appearance. As for the rest, it’s even worse. You can well believe that two years of hard labour like that we have had on the Pamir—and all that we have seen and all that we have heard—such things steady the head. At La Rochelle they listened to me as if I were an oracle, even the old people, which is quite different from what it was two years ago. Look here! I’ve pondered a little, and I now have my own opinions! Before, I was just happy-go-lucky, I didn’t care a hang for anything, I found everything perfectly simple as long as I had something to eat and my feet high and dry on the bridge if we were shipping heavy seas. Now I see more clearly the whys and the wherefores. I find life’s more complicated, and there are even times when I really think I might be quite at sea if I had to run the war myself. It’s age coming—maturity, as they call it. And so, alas, I realize that the more it goes on the more things will multiply and increase in difficulty until, if I ever have any real responsibilities, I shall be much too ancient and too concerned with a lot of considerations which will hinder me from acting. After two years of war, there is one conclusion of which I am sure: All the top men and Grand Panjandrums are too old, and what disgusts me is that it’s ten to one I’ll become like them. Everyone isn’t like Fourgues, who will soon be fifty and who can decide in five seconds because he is willing to take responsibility. But for one like that there are a hundred nonentities, and the country is suffering from it.

You will wonder if I am having the blues because I tell you this nonsense instead of the story of the Pamir, which, you say, amuses you. The 14th of July far from France, without a chum with whom to yarn—it gives me the hump. Fourgues and Villiers—who are really good fellows—tried to distract me at a music-hall in Baltimore, but I was bored. And then, hang it all——But I won’t go on. Let’s get back to the subject.

I was able to get to La Rochelle. We sent you a card, my fiancée and I. After two weeks at Bilbao, the Pamir was sent to Boucau to unload her ore. It’s a rotten port where the least swell sets the ship rolling like the deuce and where the anchorage is bad. Seeing that we should be long in unloading, as there was no proper plant, Fourgues let me hook it for La Rochelle and I didn’t stop to ask for details. I was glad that the train went fast, though I did wonder how long they were going to keep up this levity of burning coal for people on pleasure-trips instead of saving it for the soldiers and the armies. When I said that, I was told that the country would grouse if there were restrictions. That’s a wretched argument. They will have to come to it sooner or later, and then the Government will seem to have been forced and not to have foreseen anything; whereas, if it began at once, no one would be astonished. There have been other surprises since the war began and the country can stand being told there are strict orders. Only, to say that all’s for the best and that we shall never be obliged to do as the Boches do! At home I saw a lot of friends who told me stories about the censored papers, saying that things are going well and that we have all we need and that it will all be over in three or four months. What sort of fools can such writers be?

They have only to come and see and they’ll see. It’s like the Boche submarines. On that subject, old man, we of the sea have only to keep our mouths shut. Everybody knows more about it than we. During the first two or three days that I was at home, I said what I thought, but after a while I stopped because they demonstrated to me mathematically that the submarines were all bluff. All the stories I told of the sea, of my trips and what I had seen, they listened to attentively and it was flattering. Even the story of the Mer-Morte was considered very interesting. Really, it was exactly like servants reading a novel and asking for sensational details! But when I said that the Provence, the Ville-de-la-Ciotat, the Lusitania, and the rest were only the beginning, they called me a pessimist, and told me we were sinking a lot of submarines, that it was officially stated the Germans wouldn’t have any more, and, anyway, that only a thousandth of the trade had been lost, which didn’t amount to anything. The stupidest part of it was that I was obliged to say the same to my fiancée or she would have been worried to death. She made me swear to note that submarines weren’t dangerous and to keep my life-belt on all the time. I swore all she wanted. When she cries I am helpless. I didn’t tell her that the Pamir has neither wireless nor guns and isn’t likely to have them, and that if we run into a submarine all we can do is to blow on it to see if it will sneeze. As I stayed only five days the papers were not ready and we couldn’t be married. We decided that it will come off next time even if I get only forty-eight hours’ leave. I had put aside fifteen hundred francs, which I gave to her, and she will arrange everything, furniture and outfit, to set us up in a little house two or three hundred yards from her parents. Well, old man, though it was hard to say good-bye at the station, we shall be married before the year is up, I hope. Fourgues told me that I could count on eight days, but the unloading was done very quickly at Boucau because the weather cleared up, and I received a telegram the fifth day, ordering me to rejoin at Saint-Nazaire double quick. The Pamir was to call there two days after and would probably sail for America. I was rather astonished at the destination because the Pamir has the habit now of tubbing it around Europe; but sailors must be ready for anything.

Marguerite stuffed my bag full of preserves and made a big parcel of collars and handkerchiefs, socks and shirts. She has embroidered lovely initials on all of them and added some little silk pocket handkerchiefs, some coloured braces, and some absolutely ripping neckties. Dandy Dick, that’s me, old man! Villiers, who puts in all his spare time at the haberdashers’ collecting multicoloured hosiery, is dying of envy.

I couldn’t find anybody at Saint-Nazaire; only a letter at the company’s agency, in which Fourgues told me to report at Boulogne, the Pamir having been sent there, and that he would expect me the following Sunday. You can imagine what a mug I felt to have run away from La Rochelle without having had time to draw breath—and all the more so as it only gave me forty-eight more hours, not long enough for me to go home. So I stopped a day in Paris. A bobby hauled me up at the Nantes station and another in the Paris Tube, to inquire about my military status. I was in mufti. If I had only known, I should have made the entire trip in the Company’s uniform, for everyone in France looks at you askance and says disagreeable things if you’re not in uniform.

I found the Pamir at Boulogne in the Loubet dock, taking on a cargo of scrapped matériel from the British front here: wagons, guns, motor-cars, sheds, and scrap iron, to be repaired in England. Fourgues explained that the Pamir should have gone to America to get steel bars for the manufacture of shells in France, but as that order wouldn’t be ready for a month, they had seized the opportunity to have us potter around a little in the English Channel. For “pottering” it was rather important work, seeing that we made two trips each way and that both times in England we took on from two hundred to two hundred and fifty brand-new chassis for motor-cars and trolleys for the Flanders front. The English are beginning to get under way seriously. They were slow about it, but it’s not the same now as it was when we were there during the first year of the war. I don’t know how long it’s going to take them to train their new army and to make soldiers and officers, but as far as munitions go, there’s no question. You have no idea of the traffic between England and France. It is coming into all the ports—Calais, Boulogne, Fécamp, Le Tréport, Dieppe, Le Havre, Rouen, Caen—without counting the little ones. They are all crowded. As soon as we arrived in England they got to work, the Pamir was made fast to a wharf, and they pulled out her cargo and shoved in another. It took longer in France, although that, too, is a little better now than last year. Oh, it’s not ideal yet, and one often wonders what all the empty boats and cars are doing. In four or five years, maybe the officials and the office-Johnnies will look at their watches instead of piling up Forms—and Forms—and Forms.

At last we got off for Baltimore with some dozens of cases of French exports—fabrics, Parisian specialities—nothing much. When I think that the Germans continue to send their catalogues and merchandise over the whole world by way of the neutrals, and that the three-thousand-ton Pamir was sent out with scarcely two or three hundred tons of cheap stuff, it seems hardly worth while to talk in the papers about economizing. This little Atlantic trip will have cost the country some twenty-five thousand francs, some of which she ought to have recovered. And it’s like that everywhere. They can issue a new loan, but Fourgues says it’s saving the pennies and wasting billions of pounds.

Villiers and Fourgues have spent their time during the voyage squabbling at meals, arguing about all that has happened during the last two or three months: the Irish rebellion, the retreat in Mesopotamia, the Jutland battle, and the death of Kitchener—to say nothing of our own troubles.

At first Fourgues was a little overbearing toward Villiers because he believed Villiers contradicted him just to get his dander up, and two or three times he told Villiers that that was enough, that he wouldn’t have him take that tone with him. But this was in the Mediterranean when Villiers first joined with his neckties and his manicured hands. But when he put the engine right before you had time to sneeze and now that everything is going like a dream, Fourgues knows that he can’t be treated that way because it’s pretty good to have an officer on whom one can depend. So he asks Villiers’ advice on a lot of technical matters. But when it comes to their grand discussions of Naval questions and the politics of the war, they go it hammer and tongs. At bottom they hold the same views and I am beginning to believe that they wrangle for fun. Old Villiers has a little way of arguing in a calm voice, as though he were afraid of disarranging his collar or the parting of his hair. Fourgues tries to follow suit and says:

“Look here, Villiers, let’s talk this over calmly. We’re not of the same opinion, but it will do this boy good to hear your arguments.”

The “boy” is I! Ever since Villiers arrived, Fourgues has made me take a back seat because I haven’t the guts to hold my own with him. And also at present Fourgues is sick With me for not having got married at La Rochelle. He says that I am a laggard in love and that next time he will go to La Rochelle with me and march me straight to the registry from the train. If that will get me back sooner, I shall be delighted!

So, then, I listen without being obliged to take part. When Villiers is optimistic, Fourgues says that everything is going to the dogs. When Villiers is pessimistic, Fourgues says that the Allies haven’t made a single mistake and that as the Boches haven’t got us yet, we’ve got them beat and are going to wade right into them. Only, he shouts all this at the top of his voice because he can’t hold out more than five minutes in the face of Villiers’ durned coolness.

I believe they have discussed the Jutland affair at every meal, trying to find out who was beaten, what the results were, etc. Villiers is friendly with a lot of engineer officers, who, like himself, passed through the School of the Arts et Métiers and he is also accustomed to dealing with figures and is very exact. He says that things like the Jutland affair kick up a dust in the newspapers and in speeches, but that in fact they are of absolutely no use whatsoever. Fourgues is for hitting the Germans every time there is a chance, and he says that if the English had been able to smash the whole German fleet the war would be almost over. Villiers maintains that this is not true at all, that even if the big German ships were at the bottom of the sea, their coasts would still be just as well defended by guns, mines, submarines, and Zeppelins, and that the English could not get any nearer than now; he also says that if the Germans had lost all their big ships, under-sea warfare would not be changed one little bit and the submarines would give us just as much trouble. Battleships, he says, are as much ancient history as muzzle-loading cannon; in the future there won’t be anything but submarines, mines, and light boats to carry on the real work, as this war has demonstrated.

Although I know Fourgues really agrees, he would reply—just to keep things going—that as long as one side builds big ships, the other is obliged to. But Villiers didn’t catch on. He asked by what means the Gambetta, the Ocean, the Cressy, the Hogue, the Aboukir, the Bouvet, the Hampshire, and all the other big ships were sunk? Not by big ships, but by torpedoes which cost twenty thousand francs at most, but which can send battleships costing fifty millions and more to the bottom. So if for each ship worth fifty millions, twenty-five submarine torpedo-boats or mine-layers were built, the Allies would have a thousand, perhaps, and the Germans, with all the Dreadnoughts in the world, would not dare put their noses out of doors. But inversely, if the Germans had five hundred or a thousand submarines instead of big ships, they would make the sea untenable for us. As they are not people who stick to a thing when they find it’s a dud, they soon tumbled to it that submarines and mines are the weapons for war at sea and are going to turn them out like hot cakes. Fourgues repeated this conversation to me so often that I knew Villiers had shut him up completely, but he wanted to quibble, so one evening Villiers said to him: “To-morrow I’m going to bring you an estimate of the cost of the Battle of Jutland according to official accounts in England at the time we left, and you will see if it’s worth while to build big ships.”

He came to luncheon next day with his estimate and Fourgues shut up. Villiers gave me permission to make a copy to send you. He brought all the figures up to date with the latest information received in America and you simply can’t get away from it—it’s statistics. Here is the schedule. I shall copy it for you just as he put it down:

COST OF THE BATTLE OF JUTLAND

The sum-total of the money lost in the Battle of Jutland comes under five heads:—

1. English and German ships sunk;

2. Repair of damaged ships;

3. Cost of artillery;

4. Cost of coal and extras;

5. Capital represented by the men drowned and the pensions paid to their dependents.

I. Sunken Ships

German | Francs.
Derfflinger | 60 | million
Lützow | 60 | ”
Kaiser | 60 | ”
Hindenburg | 60 | ”
Pommern | 30 | ”
Elbing | 10 | ”
Wiesbaden | 10 | ”
Rostock | 10 | ”
Frauenlob | 6 | ”
Nine destroyers (in all) about | 27 | ”
One submarine | 2 | ”
German total | 335 | million
English | |
Invincible | 50 | million
Indefatigable | 50 | ”
Queen Mary | 60 | ”
Black Prince | 30 | ”
Warrior | 30 | ”
Defence | 35 | ”
Eight light vessels (in all) about | 25 | ”
English total | 280 | million
Total value of all ships sunk | 615 | million

II. Repair of Damaged Ships.

The number of ships damaged is much greater than that of ships destroyed. Some are certainly no longer available and represent a dead loss. It is impossible to determine the cost of the repair of the others, but one cannot be far from the truth in estimating under this head almost a third of what comes under the head of total destruction, or about 200 million, which, added to the first total, makes about 800 millions.

III. Cost of Artillery.

There were about fifty big ships engaged in the battle, armed with guns of 305, 340, or 380 millimetres, in varying numbers. Admitting the average number per ship to be ten guns firing two shots a minute at an average cost of 3,000 francs a shot, we have: 50 × 10 × 2 × 3,000 = 3 million francs a minute. Summing up the minutes of firing and admitting 45 as the total, we have 3 × 45 = 135 million francs. Adding the fire of the secondary armament, and guns which burst or which must be changed, the total for the artillery can be given as about 150 million, which, added to the others, makes 950 million.

IV. Cost of Coal and Extras.

A big ship going at top speed burns about 1,000 tons a day at 50 francs a ton (if not more), making 50,000 francs a day. Admitting the total of the operations at top speed and under full steam to have lasted at least one day, put down two and a half million for the big ships alone. Adding the coal for the smaller boats will bring it up to three million. The wear and tear of boilers, dynamos, and machinery, other than the damage due to the actual fighting, would make this amount up to 20 million, which, added to the preceding 950 and rounding it out with things we may not have accounted for, would constitute a total of about forty million pounds sterling for the material alone.

V. Capital Represented by the Officers and Crews.

Certain ships had only one or a few men saved. The total number of dead certainly exceeds 10,000 men. There were also many wounded, some permanently disabled, others only partly crippled. Admitting a total of 20,000 persons for whom the State must pay pensions, either to them or to their dependants, and taking an average of 10,000 francs for the annual pension, we get a sum of 20 millions as a yearly charge, which at five per cent. represents a capital of 400 million francs. It is impossible to appreciate the value represented by these 10,000 killed and 10,000 wounded, all taken from among the most fit of both nations, nor the ruin brought by their death to their families. But it is not far from the truth to put 500 millions as the total of the human loss, which, added to the preceding billion, makes the cost of the few hours of the Battle of Jutland about sixty million pounds sterling.

So there you have Villiers’ estimate. For the sake of appearances, Fourgues wished to quibble over every article, but Villiers could not be shaken because he had made his calculations according to some technical reviews he got in France and England and he said his figures were, if anything, below the actual losses. Ships always cost more than is officially stated and in time of war, coal, shells, and the rest go up from week to week, and, he said, it was very moderate of him to have reckoned 5 per cent. instead of 9 per cent. for the pensions.

“But, skipper, it’s not worth while to wrangle over a hundred millions more or less. Take any sum between one and two billions of francs. Do you mean to tell me that it made a difference of so much as a quarter of a second to the duration of the war?”

“But if they could have overwhelmed the Boches and bashed their fleet to blazes——”

“That would have cost three or four or five billions because the English would have suffered as well, and what then?”

“Then the English would only have to go back to port and warm their toes instead of being on tenterhooks all the time, leading a dog’s life on account of the big German ships.”

“That’s just what I wanted to make you say, skipper. I make every allowance. I admit that the German fleet would be destroyed. But would that diminish by one the number of their submarines? Would their mines, batteries, or torpedoes hinder us any the less from approaching their coast? Should we have one more merchant vessel on the sea or one less sunk?”

“Yes, yes; but as long as they have big ships we must have others to match.”

“I don’t agree with you. It would be sufficient for us to have hundreds of submarines in order to keep them from getting out and to hunt them down, as they do us.”

“But then their battleships would sink our cargoes?”

“Where have you seen battleships and battlecruisers becoming commerce destroyers? They are too easily damaged and they can’t take coal enough to keep at sea for long. Only light boats or submarines can destroy commerce.”

“Well, what are you driving at?”

“This: that the big ships are of no use any more except to make us spend billions in a few hours without any one being the better or the worse. That seems clear as day to me. Whereas a good submarine costing two million francs, which would carry six or eight torpedoes, and would have guns, could sink her eight or ten cargo-ships a month with a little luck. Even if the submarine is lost, it has done its work, because twenty or thirty thousand tons of wheat, coal, steel, or rubber are at the bottom of the sea. That’s what annoys the enemy! It would make less noise in the newspapers, but it’s the real work of the war. In this war the victory will fall to the one who can do the most damage to the other in the shortest time. It’s always like that and I can’t think why we haven’t seen it this time.”

I should never end if I told you all their discussions on this subject. There is something in it—the question is worth discussing, and I wish you would tell me what you think about it. Maybe you, who are on a Dreadnought, think it thundering cheek of me to write you things running down your show; but you and I don’t need to be polite to each other. Honestly, I expect an answer.

Naples,
September 23.

Dear old Man,

Since my last the Pamir has called at Baltimore, New York, Brest, Cardiff, Genoa, and Naples. We haven’t lost any time, you see. We almost went back to America to carry steel and shells again, but at the last moment we were ordered to carry food to Italy. So here we are under Vesuvius, and there’s nothing left for us now but to die, as the saying is. But I am not anxious to do that, for Fourgues has just written a strong letter to the Company saying that the Pamir must go into dry-dock considering how long she has been knocking about, especially as we hit something hard off the coast of England and he wants to know what happened, as we are getting water into the hold to the tune of about a foot a day and have to keep pumping all the time. So I hope we are going back to France to be careened. As that will take eight or ten days, Fourgues has promised that I shall be free for the civil registry and the church. So there’s something good. We didn’t take our steel from Baltimore after all. It hadn’t arrived. Depend on the Boches to organize strikes in factories, accidents on railroads, and cars gone astray! Anyway, Fourgues learned, knocking around here and there—but not from the Consular authorities—that, although there was no steel for us at Baltimore, there was heaps of it in New York rusting on the wharves waiting for someone to take it. So he upped and went and the Pamir anchored near Brooklyn Bridge and we took in three thousand tons of steel and a bit more piled on the deck. Fourgues, you may bet your neck, didn’t go at it by halves and only regretted that he couldn’t carry ten thousand tons. The Pamir was as full as she could safely stick it, and crawled like a tortoise in a nasty summer sea, which was anything but pleasant. However, we didn’t care a damn because this time we really were being of some use.

In New York, during a beano round Broadway and the swell district with Villiers, Fourgues ran into old Flannigan. I told you about meeting him in Norway last year. They all came on board in the middle of the night, a bit the worse for wear, making noise enough to waken the dead, carrying a gramophone they had pinched in a bar. They set to playing cake-walks and nigger-songs on the records which they had also pinched, and I got up at two o’clock because sleep was no longer possible. As Flannigan was to leave the next morning for the Scandinavian countries, or, as he said, going to make a trip in Bochie, he stayed on board until six or seven, drinking Dubonnet and seltzer by way of swabbing down his throat and relating his campaigns to Fourgues and Villiers, who poured down quarts and quarts of Vichy to wash out all the drugs they had put away in the saloons.

Flannigan denies it, but we are sure that he knocks around the Boches and that it’s not from hearsay that he learns all he tells. But, of course, you can’t blame him since he’s a neutral and as long as the official policy of the Entente is to let the Boches carry on their little games while the papers say the blockade is perfect, and that the Germans are tightening their belts, and that they’ll rush out presently crying “Kamerad” with their mouths open for us to shove food in. That’s not Flannigan’s opinion, nor ours either, nor that of anyone on our job. But I’ll go on with what Flannigan said:

“The Boches are not eating as much as before, that’s certain, but everybody knows that people always eat too much, and a lot of good things to eat are allowed to get in by way of Switzerland, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries.

“The land is also still there. It produces less because the fit men are at the front, but even if it produced only half as much as formerly, there would still be no famine. The Germans make a great fuss about it for the benefit of foreigners, but they are easy in their minds, and they know that England has only two-tenths of her territory under cultivation for food, and that if her provisions are cut off, it is she who will tighten her belt. They also know that they have torn the best coal-mines from France and Russia; that Italy, Russia, and France depend on what is sent to them by sea. To meet that situation the Boches are preparing something decisive in the way of submarine warfare. In 1915 they drew up a programme of construction, and when that programme is carried out they will declare submarine war to the death. They were not at all ready for U-boat warfare at the outbreak of war, as they had only twenty or thirty submarines. You may safely bet they would not have neglected the idea beforehand if they had believed it worth while.

“As they soon saw that it was their best chance, they went to work with determination, and submarines will be turned out like anything. They will be armed with big guns, will run faster than merchant-ships, and be able to stay out twenty or thirty days without difficulty. There will be others for mine-laying, to sow all the good routes with mines. All will be able to cut nets and to rest on the bottom.”

Flannigan says this is common talk in Germany, and that even if the official people in France and England don’t believe what they say publicly—that is, that it’s all bluff—they had better get ready for something nasty, for when the Germans once let loose they will go it as hard as they did when they let loose on land. Flannigan embroidered this theme for three or four hours and I can’t remember all the figures he gave. Villiers wrote down some at the time to pass on to chums in France, which will be of no use in the world, he says, as the accepted thing is to say that there aren’t any submarines.

The Pamir left New York the same day that Flannigan sailed. We took on there a fellow from the Munitions Department, a civil engineer who had gone over to America to take charge of orders for munitions, steel, etc., and who seized the chance to accompany the steel bars whose manufacture he had been supervising in the factory. His name is Mousseaux. He had had nothing to do with the sea before the war, but has now made several trips, to Serbia, Russia, Spain, and America, so is not altogether a mug. He told us a lot of scandals about munitions, the markets, orders, and the Boches, and I reckon that Mousseaux also thinks that if we are victorious it will be in spite of ourselves. He’s a sharp one, a big, blond, blue-eyed Norman. In short, what he says, goes.

He looked a bit scared when he saw that the Pamir had neither wireless, guns, nor anything else against submarines. But as he had telegraphed from inland that he would take passage with us and as he arrived the morning we sailed, he wouldn’t back out, but took things as he found them, especially as he was going to gain four or five days thereby. Ships don’t sail every day to France now. Moreover, it was his twelfth voyage since the beginning of the war and he had been on boats without wireless or guns eight times. Like all those who roll around at sea, he thinks as we do, and we soon agreed that the Merchant Service of the Allies is practically offered at present to the Boche submarines and that it can’t go on for ever. He, who is an engineer, assures us that the cost of fitting wireless on all the boats would be slight and that the price of one big well-loaded ship, sunk because it had no warning, would cover the cost of wireless for at least a hundred and fifty or two hundred cargo-steamers. Mousseaux adds that what’s wanted is a man of push and go to compel the owners, the chiefs of the Admiralty, and everybody else to agree and that then it would take only about a month. But now, no one dares to act on his own responsibility and it’s going to cost the country tens of millions.

Fourgues and Mousseaux almost fell out when Mousseaux asked what was the use of putting guns aft and none forward on the cargo boats that had them. Fourgues asked him what he meant by that.

“Yes,” answered Mousseaux, “I have been on several boats which had one gun—behind.”

“Well,” said Fourgues; “they couldn’t have asked the advice of the captain. But if they ever give me a gun, it will be surrounded by a lot of jossers from the Navy who will put it aft because the policy of the Entente is to be on the defensive as regards submarines.”

“But, skipper, the only way to bash them is to attack—fight them the moment you meet them.”

“That’s your idea and we all think so too. Please tell that in Paris to whomever it may concern. You’ll make one more to be told to shut his mouth and mind his own business, for the order is to run away—yes, sir—to run away from the U-boats—and to fire the stern gun if one has time. As for attacking—strictly forbidden, by gum! not on the programme!”

“But how can we say that we rule the waves if our ships must run and never show fight?”

“Quite so, that’s just what I want to know. They cram millions of tons of merchandise into us. They say, ‘Carry them to Europe, my son, you have nothing to fear!’ Every day we learn of a friend who has gone down before a U-boat, but it seems that didn’t count, and if we are lucky enough to meet a submarine, we mustn’t hurt it. We must leave it alone or turn our backs, like ——!

“And if we get a dose of it? Look at my masts—we haven’t even four wires to send a wireless to comrades in the neighbourhood! It doesn’t need a genius to discover what merchant-ships need! The Skippers’ Association keeps asking for it again and again and it’s as plain as the nose on your face! But everybody knows that we shan’t go on strike, and the big bugs say either that we’re afraid or else that we are rebels. So it’s go ahead or bust! And we go ahead—and every one of us knows that his turn is bound to come.”

“Besides which, skipper—though I don’t wish to criticize the Merchant Service—the passengers are sure to be drowned if the ships are torpedoed. On the Pamir you have two lifeboats, which might be enough for your forty men. But I have crossed on ships with a thousand or twelve hundred in the crew and no means of saving more than four or five hundred. As a rule, half the lifeboats—all those on the side which goes up in the air after the torpedoing—are of no use; so you can see that it takes courage to go to sea and that it’s folly to send whole regiments without protection. After so many months of war the civilians still find it amusing. If things were like that on land, the parliaments or the newspapers would have had them changed long ago. But knowing nothing of seafaring, the country swallows any story it’s told. And you’re in luck that it doesn’t understand anything about it.”

“Thunder and blazes!” answered Fourgues. “You call that luck? You mean, it’s enough to make one bash one’s head against the binnacle! It’s worse than you think. After all, I don’t care a damn, we’re among friends and can speak plainly. Will you believe that the Navy has not yet given orders for notices to be posted up on mail and other steamers, telling passengers what to do in case of submarines? So they go on board like sheep, carrying the latest newspaper in which is printed that U-boats are all rot. And when they are torpedoed, it’s butchery, sir, it’s massacre; and there’s nothing to say because if it’s that way, well—that’s the way they want it! And what do you expect them to do, these hundreds of land-lubbers, when the ship begins to rock? No one has told them anything. They don’t know anything. They run around, squealing like pigs, jumping into lifeboats, cutting ropes—and that’s so many drowned to shove down on the account. If a single general treated our soldiers like that, he would be suspended first and then court-martialled.”

Do you get Fourgues’ tone? We don’t bother on the Pamir with land affairs and politics. The sea is enough for us. We feel that we are being hunted from day to day and that it comes closer with each voyage, but we can say nothing, do nothing. That’s forbidden!... Oh, I forgot something that Flannigan told us in New York about the crews of the German submarines. The newspapers and the French authorities say that the good German crews have long since been destroyed and that submarine crews can’t be turned out in a day like hot cakes, so we can be easy on that score. Flannigan says that’s all humbug. In the first place, with money one can get what one wants in any country and the Germans pay their submarine crews royally. And then everybody knows that on a submarine there are only two fellows who have to understand the whole business—the captain and the second in command who have charge of the diving and steering. As to the crew, they have mechanics’ jobs, they look after levers, and valves, and so on, just as in any factory, and merely carry out the orders of the two chiefs; they have to turn this, turn that, and so forth. It wouldn’t take forever to learn that! Any mechanic can learn all there is to know in a month and so they have first-rate crews like those on the Zeppelins. There’s only the risk. But I’d like to know in what country danger stops the fellows with nerve? Neither in France nor in Bochie! Moreover, Flannigan said, after the submarine crews have drudged for fifteen or twenty days at sea, they are given leave ashore and spend a week or two with their families while other mechanics put the machinery in order. And they are treated like heroes and fêted everywhere, as well as given their part in the prize-money, so that there are more volunteers for the job than they require, just as in the French aviation service—where, of course, you get smashed up, but only after having had a smack at the enemy.

And Flannigan also said that the German Admiralty doesn’t tie up the submarine commanders on the pretext that they are young. It gives them a free rein, sends them out with full power to act and doesn’t bother any more about what they do nor about the Forms they fill up. When things are run like that we can expect a rotten time from the U-boats. If a quarter of that were done for the French, I believe we could pinch the moon.

At Brest our steel was not unloaded very fast, but that’s what you expect. And what a splendid harbour! It would hold all the ships of Europe and America and as it’s the nearest to the United States, from twelve to twenty-four hours could be saved on all trans-Atlantic voyages. Fourgues says you need to be French not to use such a port. It’s because we are too rich, he says. If the Germans or the English or the Yankees had Brest, they would make the first trans-Atlantic port of the world out of it, beating Hamburg, Rotterdam, London, Liverpool, and New York all together to a frazzle. But the Navy won’t make a move so the Atlantic trade and our good money go elsewhere.

At Brest there were a lot of boats starting for Archangel with material which will probably be wasted in Manchuria or Thibet as Flannigan has told us that the Czar is surrounded by a whole clique who are working for the Boches. Fourgues would have liked the Pamir to make the little Russian trip last year all over again, but they sent us to Cardiff with orders to take on coal and we sailed in ballast according to custom. It annoys Fourgues now to carry coal as it’s some time since the Pamir has carried any but clean cargoes, but we knew why when we reached Cardiff—the owner is behind this. I understand nowadays why there jolly well is a profit in coal and the Pamir will have paid for herself with this voyage. She can sink now! Fourgues and I have pulled our weight—the owner will be able to smoke dollar cigars.

We almost did get sunk off Sallys on leaving Cardiff for Genoa. It was between two and three in the afternoon, during Fourgues’ watch. The Pamir struck something which shook her from keel to truck, but whatever it was, it didn’t explode. Perhaps it was a submarine which will know we passed (let’s hope for the best!). Or perhaps a mine that didn’t go off. Nothing happened to us except that we have forty tons of water a day in the hold and must keep the pump going all the time. As we still have coal on board I can’t tell you what’s the matter, but it’s something pretty stiff. Fourgues and Villiers think that we can manage to get to France in order to get into dock there, but the day after to-morrow when we get rid of our coal, we shall know what has been smashed. From Cardiff to Genoa we fairly slopped. Never have we had such a wet passage. Fine weather, too. Not a single patrol-boat except at Gibraltar. We aren’t astonished to find no patrol-boats, but why say the routes are guarded?

At Genoa we loafed around for four days. There was a mistake regarding the destination of the coal, which was for factories at Naples and Rome. Visited the city and neighbourhood. They’re not overdoing things in Italy. Fact is, old man, France is the only country that is really pulling her full weight in this war—in men, territory, money and effort.

We cleared from Genoa for Naples, where they are worrying even less. There’s no doubt about it, but there are several classes not yet mobilized. Of course it’s none of my business. I know where I am in the Merchant Service, but when it comes to other things, people can always say I’m talking rot. We anchored in the port, between two warships which are not in the Strait of Otranto. Our coal was unloaded at a gentle pace.

To speak of other matters, they say that Rumania is going to come into the game and there is talk of Italy declaring war on Germany. Fourgues says that means at least six months more of war, which is to say the more Allies there are, the longer it will last, what?...

And now, old man, I must say good-bye. Fourgues and Villiers are going to take me to a music-hall in Toledo Street this evening to see if I am a real incorruptible fiancé, as they call it. I shall be awfully bored. If we go into dry-dock at home, I will send you a wire c/o the Navy Department and if the Auvergne is in France, come to La Rochelle right away, so that I can embrace you the first after my wife.

Marseilles,
October, 1916.

Best of Friends,

Happy people have no history. You left for Argostoli or Piræus and I got your wire on my wedding-day. My wife, who is with me at Marseilles, sends you warm greetings with her regrets that you were not there. Fourgues came. He made a little speech which literally doubled us up, and presented me with a fine lamp of wrought-iron. Villiers gave me a love of a hookah with two tubes, to soothe my wife and me if we quarrel. Thanks for the present which is on the way. The Pamir is in dock and will be ready in four or five days. Here’s to our next merry meeting, old man, I am as happy as a king and I wish you the same luck when your turn comes.

Marseilles,
October 30, 1916.

Dear old Chap,

My wife left yesterday for La Rochelle, as the Pamir was to have left Marseilles yesterday evening. But we were delayed, as Fourgues thinks we are going to ship a cargo. So I am writing again, as I only sent you a short letter and have received a long one from you. I don’t want to seem to preach, but—get married! Find a woman you like and then go right ahead. Take my word for it, for fellows like us, who live lives very different from those sheltered land-lubbers, it’s a revelation and it’s true happiness. I am no longer the same, and this is not an exaggeration. If it were otherwise I should tell you. Well, here am I utterly wretched because Marguerite left yesterday and because the Pamir must get under way so soon. To have a girl all to yourself, to listen to the things she says, that no one has ever heard before, and then to go away to sea—it’s something that can’t be described.

Add to this the war and the mines and the submarines! Fourgues is quite right—no man knows what he has in him till he gets a wife, a real one, and leaves her. What a profession ours is! Life seems so beautiful—one launches into it like a ship on the sea. But when, to support a wife you adore, you have to earn a living at the price of never being with her, it’s the worst of all. Yesterday, at the station, she went and I was left on the platform. She had implored me to be prudent, to save myself if the Pamir should go down, to forget my self-respect and that I am an officer, and to think of her. I swore! But you know what professional honour is. I knew I was lying. I knew that if the catastrophe came, the mariner would conquer the married man. What a terrible last day! We love each other so much that we did not dare speak: the sea was between us. I suffered the tortures of the damned. Was I right to marry her during the war. Later, there would have been no torpedoes or submarines—we could have accepted our separation with more patience. But now! Now I am afraid for my skin! If it were only my skin! But she! My body will go, but all the rest stays with her. And if I go down, what will be my last thoughts? I shall see her at La Rochelle, waiting for me and wringing her hands, and she will never know whether I am dead or not. It is atrocious. Don’t marry before peace. I swore to her that the submarines were all rot. But you and I know well that they are there—and everywhere—and that we’ve nothing against them on the Pamir. The people on land are sending us to the slaughter. Have they no mothers, no wives or daughters or sisters—those who refuse us guns and wireless? They sing the glory of France and they choke Frenchmen like that fellow in the Bible who offered up his son. The sea and the torpedoes make me afraid, my poor chap. I am afraid—afraid.

Marseilles,
November 2, 1916.

Forgive me, my dear old man, for my letter of the day before yesterday. I was going through a crisis. I hope you will never have to experience anything similar. But one sees what life means when one has adopted a second self for life and desires her happiness. It’s all over now. The Pamir is taking on stuff for the Army of the East and for the Fleet which is at Salonica. So shop claims me and calms me. My wife writes delightful letters. She is not as anxious now as when she was here. I’m getting along, old man. I went through a rotten gale, but it’s over now. You must have laughed at me. Didn’t you?

I read Fourgues and Villiers your answer about the Battle of Jutland and the matter of the big warships. It pleased them. They understood very well when you said that all the young men in the Navy know that big Dreadnoughts are of no use except to train men for promotion to the higher commands. That’s plain. Villiers says that it’s a matter of psychology, but that it’s necessary to be on the inside to understand it. You, who are on the inside, explain it very well. In this Naval war there are the young who do the daily work, just like merchant vessels, but they don’t count. And then there are the big bugs who hold together so that each may get promotions, pay or orders. It’s very simple; thanks for your account of it. The Pamir now knows how the land lies, and that’s all we want as long as we don’t go down!

We carry flour, shells, guns—perishable and non-perishable material—the whole caboodle. At this moment, my dear old chap, my pen is writing to you, my body is here, but my heart is at La Rochelle and I know that it’s all up with me now, that I would give the whole war for one trip down there. Of course, I wish for our victory. But if the Pamir is ever torpedoed and sinks, you can believe that I shall go to the bottom cursing eternally all those whom I did not know, who left us without defence.

Good luck, old man.

Argostoli,
December 16, 1916.

Dear old Chap,

Going from Marseilles to Salonica before reaching Matapan, the Pamir was torpedoed—fired upon and missed—by a Boche submarine. The truth is, we shouldn’t mind being sent down if we could hit back and if all precautions had been taken. When a poilu stops a bullet in an attack, if he has time to know about it before he dies he sees that his pals are delivering the goods and that gives him heart when he’s about to cast off. But as for us, old man, it’s not our fault nor that of the submarine if I am writing you to-day. Some are unlucky and some are lucky, and that’s the way things are! It was early morning, during my watch, when the shells began to fall. The weather was like the Last Judgment, and I was looking at the rollers which fell smack on our stem and rushed away foaming. All of a sudden there were columns of foam, which shot up like tufts of feathers on the port side at about three hundred yards. They rose as high as our funnels. I said “Hell! We’re near a reef and the sea is breaking over it!” I put the helm over and went to look at the chart. There were no more rocks charted than in the white of my eye. So I righted the helm after having sent word to Fourgues that there was something funny on the sea, and just as he reached the bridge a bunch of shells fell twenty yards to starboard. There was no doubt about it—there was a submarine squirting at us and we with our arms folded, unable to answer back! But anyway, we should have been at a loss, for it was almost ten minutes before we knew from where or from what they came. The Pamir was rolling like a log and the sea was as choppy as could be. It must have been that which worried the submarine, for the shots fell in front, behind, to port, and to starboard.

Finally, during a calm moment, we saw puffs of smoke three or four miles ahead and spray breaking about the Boche. Then we turned our backs and hooked it as fast as we could. I couldn’t possibly tell you how many “thunders and blazes” Fourgues let out! I didn’t count them. He stamped and pulled at his beard:

“Look at that devil sending us his shells while we sit here like impotents! But then, if they had given us guns they would have been pea shooters or cocktail-straws and we couldn’t have fired more than four or five thousand yards. Look at her! She’s at least seven thousand yards away and is missing us only because of the swell. If it were calm we should be done for already!”

At the end of a quarter of an hour we had counted about forty shells and the submarine stopped wasting her pills and bore down on us at full speed, and you can guess, old man, that she gained on us hand over hand.

The Pamir, loaded with about three thousand five hundred tons, was down into the trough of the sea like a lump of lead and couldn’t make more than seven knots doing her damnedest. The Boche shot through the water like a fish. They must have closed her hatches and, of course, she didn’t mind the waves breaking over her, being built to navigate with water on all sides. She must have gained three or four knots on us, for after giving chase for three-quarters of an hour, she was only a thousand yards away. We saw her slow up a bit and open the hatches and the gunners came to fire from the deck! The first two shots fell twenty yards short and fifty too far. Fourgues said to himself that the third was going to hit and he put the helm hard aport so that we should rot up their aim. Just at that moment a hollow sea came along and shook us from stem to stern. Everything stowed on the deck began to slide and fouled the port tiller-rope, which jammed. Steering became impossible. The Pamir kept turning around to port, only she couldn’t turn fast on account of the heavy seas, but the submarine doubtless believed that it was in order to run her down that we headed that way, so the Boche gunners scrambled through the hatches and shut them and they submerged on the spot. After that, not a thing to be seen! While our crew was hauling the packing cases around on the deck, trying to clear the tiller-rope, the Pamir went round and round like a horse working a merry-go-round, and rolled and pitched without stopping. Then the submarine must have come nearer, for we saw the wakes of two torpedoes, one forward at about thirty yards and another which missed us aft. The second was well aimed and came straight at us. We could move neither hand nor foot, nor do anything but make the sign of the Cross and think of our families. But this torpedo couldn’t have been set to go very deep. As the Pamir is not armoured, a hole at the water-line would be enough to finish her. Well, the torpedo got caught in the trough of a wave which made it leap into the air like a carp about a hundred yards from us and fall back into the water at right angles to its course. It passed behind us and we all breathed again.

The Boche must have been disgusted at losing two torpedoes and nearly fifty shells in one hour on a boat that steered like a cork. She came to the surface again at two or three thousand yards without sending us anything more and hooked it towards another ship coming from the west, the Worthminster, a big English tramp loaded with munitions, which had put in at Marseilles and had left the same hour as we, but which had fallen behind so that we lost sight of her the night before. I believe the Worthminster went down. Salonica was her destination and she didn’t arrive there. We asked for news, but mum’s the word everywhere, and when the moon is made of green cheese we shall know, perhaps, if our mates of the Worthminster are feeding the crabs.

You can be sure Fourgues made a hell of a row because the Pamir had not been able to send a wireless message to the Worthminster, which had wireless, as we had seen at Marseilles. To see a submarine running after a friendly ship and not to be able to say, “Turn back to the west! Shells and torpedoes are coming!”—you’ll admit that’s enough to make one groan with despair! If only our tiller-rope hadn’t jammed, Fourgues would have chased after the Boche at the risk of being shelled, because the Worthminster would have seen that something was up and would have disappeared. But it took two hours to clear the tiller-rope and repair it and stop turning round and round. So Fourgues went on his way signalling that he had seen a Boche submarine near Matapan and all the boats we met bore south. Those who came behind us were sunk, I suppose, without anyone being able to warn them.

At Salonica the Naval authorities asked Fourgues a pack of questions about the show. As the Pamir had received no damage in the hull or upper works they tried to make Fourgues say he had dreamed it all and that he had seen no more submarine than in my eye. He was so indignant that he didn’t even get into a rage.

“Very well,” he said. “If it’s necessary to let yourself be sent to the bottom in order to prove that you have seen a submarine, next time I will stop and wait for it and then perhaps you’ll believe me. In any case you will get confirmation from the Worthminster which——”

When he mentioned the Worthminster the others looked odd and that makes us sure that she is lost. But they wouldn’t give any information. They merely questioned Fourgues:

“Why didn’t you warn the Worthminster?”

“No wireless.”

“Why didn’t you try to ram the submarine?”

“Tiller-rope jammed and damaged.”

“Why didn’t you attack the submarine?”

“No guns and a high sea.”

“Why didn’t you signal the Worthminster?”

“She was on the horizon and it was raining. You couldn’t have seen a signal at five hundred yards.”

And so on and so forth. Fourgues left abruptly, filing a written statement, and saying that as the folks who are drowned are blamed and the landsmen find fault with them, he would wash his hands of the whole business, and the next time he would let the submarine go about its job in order to settle the account and shut them up. But that, old man, was just the bad temper of the moment, for he doesn’t want the Pamir to rot at the bottom of the sea any more than I do.

While we were unloading our stuff for the Army of the East, there were not a few cargo boats in the harbour, and one day Fourgues invited the skippers of all of them to a luncheon. As he is very popular, there were fifteen or twenty of us at table, all men of brawn and nerve who have knocked about from north to south ever since the beginning of the war, with millions of tons of merchandise in the hold, and any number of soldiers. It was a treat to hear such conversation from these men who really work and who aren’t afraid of anything. And then, between sailors, there’s no side. And Fourgues, who presided, isn’t easily gulled. So each spun his little yarn when his turn came, without trying to stuff anybody. All had been more or less attacked, torpedoed, or shelled, but they had obviously escaped since they were there! They said, though, that the Germans were settling seriously to the game, and that sooner or later no one would get through without damage. There were some who had wireless and guns; only, their guns were outranged by those of the submarines which had attacked them, and when they called for hours by wireless to warn others of danger, no one answered. There were some with wireless and no guns, and as they had only one operator and one man is only one man and can’t stay with the receiver at his ear twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four without going crazy, their ships were not kept constantly informed of danger and had some narrow squeaks. There were others who had guns and no wireless, but their guns were duds which jammed at the third shot, so they might as well have had none. And then there were those who had neither guns nor wireless, like the Pamir. These were in the majority and the only reply they can make to a submarine is to make their wills. To talk about such a state of things is not exactly merry, and without Fourgues, who was in fine form that day, it might have turned into a regular funeral service, especially as they also spoke of their lifeboats, which are insufficient everywhere; of their engines, which are at their last gasp as the result of overwork; of their ships, which hold together only because they’re good-natured, but which are sprung all over the shop; in short, old man, all the little worries which you have known in the past, but which were a joke compared with the present mess.

During coffee, Fourgues summed up by saying that since no one cared a damn about cargo boats and tramps as long as the sailors kept quiet, perhaps it was time for the officers and captains of the Merchant Service to say what should be done and get together so as to discuss and decide on some line of action. They all agreed and drew up a programme, which they bound themselves to ask their colleagues to sign wherever they went, and also arranged to send a deputation to Paris as soon as possible. But you can understand, old man, how it is they haven’t much hope of its coming to anything. They will be told to go and get themselves sunk, and that no one asked for their advice, and what the deuce do the people who do the work mean by daring to give their opinion about it? As the country knows nothing about the Merchant Service and as it is being assured that all goes well at sea, the only satisfaction the captains will have will be to know they were right, and when they arrive in port they’ll be able to count how many of their chums have gone to Davy Jones’s locker. Amen and glory be to those who are torpedoed!

If I had the time and knew how, I could tell you a lot of interesting things about Salonica that happened while we were there: Venizelos, the movement forward towards Monastir, the National Government, etc. You bet there’s plenty happening and lots of rumours. But I should need whole logs to tell about it, and then, outside my profession, I am afraid of putting my foot in it. Anyway, the Army of the East was glad to get our cargo from Marseilles—material for the railroad, tractors, tyres, gun-carriages, and petrol. When ships are late, operations are retarded by so much. If a ship is sunk, they have to wait for its substitute before they can go ahead. The stock must be collected again in France, sent to Marseilles, another boat found and loaded, which makes a month’s delay besides which something is always missing from the second shipment, some trifle that is enough to keep a vehicle or a gun or a railroad at a standstill. This kind of thing never happens at the front in France. There, they have only to telephone to the base in order to get what they want. Here, when you haven’t a thing, you haven’t got it and that’s all there is about it. But the French papers are howling that the Commander at Salonica is letting the grass grow under his feet! I’m only the mate on the Pamir, but I’d rather have my job than Sarrail’s.

From Salonica we went to the Piræus, Salamis, and all around there to deliver spare stores and supplies to the ships of the Fleet: screws, boiler-tubes, electric cables, torpedoes, sheet-iron, and tools—a regular hardware shop! We went from one anchorage to another, spitting out a few tons here and a few there, and picking up scraps of stories about the 1st of December at Athens, first-hand, all of them. Don’t expect, though, that I will blab any of it to you. The mails aren’t safe. But it isn’t the things that really happen that count—it’s what is said officially. Fourgues maintains that it’s very philosophical: only the official folks have any interest in telling lies for their own protection and they’re the only people who are believed. He adds that this war, no matter where you turn, is the Triumph of the Lie! He’s got a way of hitting things off just so! While the Pamir was making her little Odyssey (Villiers’ expression) in the Greek ports, we three asked ourselves again of what use those great warships were, with their thousands of crew and their enormous guns. If it’s for our prestige in the East, one day like the 1st of December can wipe out the effect of a thousand battleships. If it’s for a Naval battle, then against whom? The Austrians? In that case there’s no need to keep more than twice as many ships as the Austrians have, and it would be better to dismantle the other French ships which are devouring coal and stupefying tens of thousands of sailors with idleness who would be much better on trawlers and little patrol-boats. With one great useless ship they could arm ten or fifteen that would be of some use. If all they want is to give the Boches targets worth shooting at when the big ships go for refit to France or Bizerta—why not Kamchatka?—when Italy is close by, we can understand. But it doesn’t concern me, of course, and, indeed, I have enough with the Pamir and navigation.

At Argostoli, where they sent us to empty our holds for the battleships which were there, we kept on thinking the same things. Crews and young officers are bored to death and eating their hearts out in their longing for active service, the only service possible nowadays for men in the Navy—submarine-chasing in little boats! Ah, well, you bet that wouldn’t suit everybody. So, to make it look as though they were doing something, they keep up a lot of drill, as in time of peace. There it is! But what do you expect? There isn’t any war for them except that perhaps they may be torpedoed, and, of course, they must look as though they were of some use! So here is another French force lying bottled up and one of prime quality—nothing but beefy great chaps who ask only to leave their ships and go into danger! They aren’t like the fellows who want to get out of the trenches in order to make money far from the madding shells. Sailors would like to go on the real sea and just be paid as much as before. But whether they want to or not, it’s all the same. Communications are cut off between them and France, where no one knows a thing about the Navy and cares as little about it as the moon.

You should have seen how they fairly rushed us at Argostoli to get the latest news of Athens and the Fleet, from which we had come, straight! They know nothing here, or almost nothing. So at first, Fourgues, Villiers, and I began to roll off our first-hand information, believing that they asked questions in order to know. Not at all, old chap. All the Brass Hats opened their eyes as big as saucers and then told us to hold our tongues about it. France can let a hundred men and six officers be killed like rats in a trap, but no one must say how it was done. So Fourgues and the two of us shut up tight, and we replied to the young’uns, who knew bits of the story, that we had not the right to tell what we knew. So there you have us playing the censor, old man! It fits us about as well as gloves on a turtle! But as adventures are the forming influence of youth, after this business I understand the censorship, though I never understood it before, and used to ask myself why a country like France should not be told the truth. The censorship, old man, is to keep people from developing heart disease. Not the people at the front or on the sea, who couldn’t be any sicker after hearing the truth than they are after a shell or a torpedo, but the jacks-in-office who get advancement or a reputation through the war and who don’t want to have their noses rubbed in their little mishaps. But to think that a country like ours, where everyone goes laughing to the slaughter, should be treated like that to cover the tracks of a pack of incompetents! It’s enough to make you laugh till the Day of Judgment!

All the same, it’s more or less funny to see how the natives of this country have made game of us behind our backs ever since the 1st of December. What are we waiting for—to make them sweat ten times the blood of those French sailors? To hell with “outside influences”! What the devil do we care that this Power or that doesn’t want to hurt their darling Tino! But French blood is French business, and we could say to all the rest, “Hands off! Let me settle this score!” Besides, with lubbers who admire nothing but the big stick, as you see from the way they go down on their knees with their mouths open before the Boches, it’s absurd to be considerate. But we keep on talking rot about memories of ancient days and all these Helleno-Boches, who are well aware of our stupidity, harp on that string and take advantage of us. Are we really such born fools as to be taken in by such humbug? Fourgues explained it all to me in very few words, as he can:

“Listen to this, my boy. There are adventurers, crooks who intend to marry the lady with the money-bags. So they recite poetry, mouth, and strike romantic poses. The good woman lets herself be taken in and goes before the registrar with her money-bags behind. And what does she get? He, the tender heart, beats her, makes off with the money, and then laughs at her into the bargain. Well, it’s the same thing with the Greek government and the Allies. They harp on their great ancestors, Themistocles and Canaris, and when we come with assurances of friendship we get a hundred bluejackets murdered. If we gave them tit for tat, things might be better. But we say ‘Let’s talk it over!’ So everybody sits down in a circle on the corpses and it’s French blood that makes the council table! If instead of this we said to them, ‘Constantine or bread!’ and sealed their ports with ships which are doing nothing, in a week we should be rid of those lads who fire in our backs, cut our bridges, and get their instructions from Potsdam every morning. But what do you expect, my boy? The Frenchman lets himself be killed and then says, ‘Pardon me!’ At least, that’s what it looks like.”

Well, old man, I don’t know just who Themistocles and Canaris were—humbugs, no doubt, but the rest is as plain as day. What lies can they be telling about it in France? Even here, only two days from the Piræus, we, of the Pamir, who were there, can’t get people to listen to us. What must it be at home?

And boredom! The Pamir is waiting for orders. It’s a habit now! Fourgues is afraid they will make us take coal, seeing that that commodity is now dearer than meat. But I don’t care a whoop nor a damn nor a double-damn! And if you aren’t like me, your stripes have indeed changed you. Cheery-oh!

Norway,
February 18, 1917.

Godfather!

I am sure you are stunned by the above form of address. However, it’s not so far wrong. There’s going to be a little conscript—or a little mamma—for the class of 1937 who will look like me, I hope, and you are ex-officio godfather. Now, no objections! I heard about it only the other day on our arrival in Bergen. The letter had been chasing around after me for two months, but we have rolled about so during that time—and then, too, the censor held up the letters in Greece—that it’s a brand-new future papa who sends you this announcement. If you don’t congratulate me, you are no friend of mine!

That will do for family history. But you know such a thing doesn’t happen every day in a man’s life. Don’t think I’m bragging because there’s going to be a little post-card for which I made the design. No, old man, I’m not trying to come it over you. Just do the same when you can—and if you can—and we’ll call it square. And if you have the luck to be the first to see my little beggar, male or female, embrace the mother and the baby for me. You know that I mean it with all my heart.

It’s so long since I wrote you last, that I can’t remember where I posted the letter. I believe you were in dry-dock at Bizerta and I was waiting at Argostoli. If I repeat myself, pass over that part and begin where I left off.

Here is where we have been: Argostoli, Messina, Ajaccio (but that was extra as you shall see), Lisbon, Bilbao, Brest, Liverpool, Bergen, and the Norwegian ports where the Pamir is collecting wood. And we’ve wasted no time either at sea or in port, as you will find. This time our work has been useful, and except for the German blockade which catches us in Norway, everything is going well. But I will do as Villiers does when he argues—take one thing at a time!

At Argostoli there were three other merchant-ships which were clearing at the same time as the Pamir, or very nearly, and we were told to travel together to join a big cruiser west of Cerigo in order to make up a convoy with other boats which the cruiser had collected at Salonica, Salamis, and elsewhere. There was one destroyer, the Revolver, to escort the lot of us. As you might guess, the convoy was composed of hookers, of which some made eight knots and others fourteen, and as we all met towards night, the next morning some were lost over the horizon ahead and others behind. We managed as best we could and followed the secret route. Near morning of the second day, the cruiser hoisted a lot of signals to tell us to head south because a submarine had been at work on the secret route during the night. So we all stampeded for the south, the fastest ahead, the lumberers behind, and the Pamir well in the middle. It was worth paying for to see that obstacle race! The cruiser had orders to call at Messina or somewhere along that coast, but neglected to tell us, so she collected us somehow or other and conducted us into the Straits of Messina where we found ourselves all in a bunch about noon. And if there had been a submarine looking on, she couldn’t have missed us any more than she could have missed an elephant in a window. There the cruiser and the destroyer signalled good-bye and ordered us to follow the secret route as far as Marseilles from where each should proceed to his destination along the secret routes. But as there was no police, the fast boats put on speed, the others dragged, and on arriving before Bonifacio, the Pamir had no one in sight but a big steamer which disappeared off the horizon ahead that night. We kept on all night and the next morning what did Fourgues see? The same big steamer disabled, having received a torpedo in the rudder and screw, and asking to be towed. As she had a gun, Fourgues thought she must have peppered the submarine, which had probably hooked it to wait for the others who were coming along the same course. The submarine had perhaps missed us by an hour or an hour and a half at most, but we saw nothing of her while we were over-hauling the steamer Sainte Eulalie, nor while we were towing her into Ajaccio. It wasn’t easy to pass the tow-rope, for there was still a touch of mistral about and the Sainte Eulalie had broached to. One of our men had his hand smashed by the first hawser, which broke. The second held, and the Pamir towed the cripple to Ajaccio at five knots speed. There we unloaded our wounded man. The convoy being dispersed, there was no need to go to Marseilles, so Fourgues lit out straight for Lisbon, where he had been told to call at Argostoli, but he permitted himself the luxury of sailing outside the secret route. When I say outside, I mean about fifty miles off, except at Gibraltar, where, of course, everybody has to pass. But if the Navy can’t guard Gibraltar, there’s nothing to do but pull up the ladder and order the funeral wreath.

Fourgues said that voyages at sea were beginning to offer a little too much variety for him to follow secret routes, and as long as he was not absolutely forced to do so, he would look a little farther and avoid submarines. So he struck the Spanish coast a little south of the Balearic Isles and we hugged it as far as Lisbon.

He said that, perhaps, it made him lose a day, but that there is less danger near the coast, for if you are torpedoed, you may have time to beach the ship and save it later, or, at any rate, the crew and lifeboats are almost sure to be saved, having only to row a bit to reach land. Fourgues added that this ought to be the general rule.

At Lisbon we coaled, and the Pamir took the stuff the Portuguese Navy gave us for the Expeditionary Corps Portugal is forming in France. We were well received in Lisbon—not as in other Allied countries, where people are jolly lukewarm. The Portuguese are all out. They aren’t rich and their army is not huge, but all they ask for is to have a smack at the Germans and bash them in, which ought to be the ideal of all the Allies, instead of going in for shady diplomacy like some.

We filled only our aft hold at Lisbon with Portuguese war-material, going on to Bilbao to stuff the forward hold with steel. We fairly rushed it in. The Spanish—I mean the Spanish ship-owners—have begun to hang fire a bit about shipping us ore; for they say the Boches are going to send all ships to the bottom, and Spain doesn’t want to lose her fleet. So they ask enormous prices, and that means endless bargaining, while the ore piles up on the docks. That’s why the Pamir loaded so fast.

I’m writing this as quickly as I can because I want to get to what we’re at now and the Norwegian rumours, and the mail-boat leaves the day after to-morrow. We lit out for Brest where the Pamir left the Portuguese stuff and the Spanish metal. During the passage we sailed near a wreck, or rather fifty bits of wreck—wood, logs, buoys, etc.—scattered over half-a-mile of the sea. Fourgues made us search all the afternoon to see if we could find a raft or the lifeboats of the torpedoed ship. But it must have been as it was with the Suffren, which left nothing but her absence as proof of shipwreck. We were unsuccessful. When you come upon a tragedy like that and tell yourself that your turn may come, perhaps in a quarter of an hour—well, you are not so chirpy about the success of our Naval strategy as they are in Paris.

When they had emptied out our stuff at Brest, the Pamir waited a day at the outside and was sent to Norway to look for wood in the shape of planks and joists. I guess there aren’t any boats to spare now, although the papers say that there are a hundred thousand arrivals and departures each week and that the submarine war has proved a fiasco for the Boches. At the beginning of the war they never minded letting the Pamir slack it in port for eight or ten days. But now we’re on the go all the time. All the other fellows we have seen are hard at it, too. It will go on as long as it can and then, at some given moment, the whole show will stop. And then they’ll begin to cut down the food and coal of the country a bit, and then a bit more, and a bit more still, while we shall continue to be sent to the bottom. If this would open their eyes at home to the importance of the Merchant Service and the need of giving it protection, that would be something! But you’ll see they’ll make the people swallow some fresh lie! France is not a maritime country and will always let herself be humbugged about the sea. But I am anticipating and talking as though the Boche blockade had already been declared at that time, whereas it has only come about since we reached Norway.

So then, we left Brest. We were ordered to sail by way of the Irish Channel, an old acquaintance of ours since the war. In the English Channel, about ten o’clock in the morning, straight ahead of the Pamir I saw a mine which must have become detached from the bottom and which was drifting like a dam’ log. If this had happened at night, old man, I should not be writing to you nor would any of the rest on board, because it was enough to blow up four Pamirs put together. I put the helm over. We looked at the mine and admired it and that was all. No gun to send it to the bottom! No wireless with which to inform the authorities at Liverpool of the existence of said mine! But as we had to take aboard some “spares” at Birkenhead we anchored in the Mersey.

Unfortunately, Fourgues telegraphed the owner that he was in Liverpool, and the owner, who never loses a chance to feather his nest, answered that he must wait forty-eight hours in order to take freight that was urgently needed in Norway. This feverishly awaited freight, old man, was wagon-loads and mountains of sugar, preserves, and jams. It seems that in Norway they aren’t afraid to buy things that are worth their weight in gold in France. If you want my opinion, I will say that thin Norwegians won’t get any stouter on that cargo. Farther south there are gaping mouths and it’s for them we shall have worked! You can fool some people all the time! The Allies’ blockade is like a net with broken meshes, here just as in Greece and other places. But that’s another story.

During the crossing from Liverpool to Bergen—which I recommend if you like gymnastics, for we never for one moment ceased rolling like the very deuce—Villiers amused himself making calculations according to the ship’s log to see how many miles the Pamir has travelled and how much merchandise she has transported during the thirty months of war. He found that we have been round the world three and a half times and carried between eighty and a hundred million tons of stuff! We might have exceeded the latter figure if we had not made so many voyages in ballast. But, anyway, such as it is, Fourgues said that the Pamir had done her bit. When you think that the biggest cargo boats can double and treble that record and that France needs it all, you can say that the Merchant Service has deserved well of her. Dear old chap, you know that I am not saying this to brag and make out that we are wonderful fellows! All that is very well for Mummy’s darlings who have their photographs taken to put in the papers or for the old buffers who spread themselves in the pubs in Paris. You know the sort who do as little as they can and make the most of it. But we who trudge up and down the earth and carry on without anyone knowing anything about it and who get more kicks than half-pence, without counting torpedoes and mines—and not more than eight days’ leave in port—I wonder what the Allies would have done if we hadn’t been there, right on the job and with our mouths shut? After this if the French people do not come to understand what the Merchant Service represents, all I can say is, their brains need a surgical operation, and there’s nothing for it but to let all our ships rip, and take to agriculture instead. Look at it any way you like: France needs the whole world to help her if she is to win the war, and as there are no railroads to Australia or Argentine or the United States, or to any of the countries which furnish us with raw material, she’d be in the soup without the Merchant Service. But a fat lot she cares about us. There’s no fear of anyone in Paris bothering, and we shall keep on just the same while those gentlemen go right on hypnotising themselves, some with words and the others with bank-notes enough to burst their pockets.

At Bergen we emptied out the grub destined for the Boches, and I have the honour to inform you that our men smashed just as many cases as possible, firing them out on to the wharf. The owner will lose nothing by it, though, for you may be perfectly sure that he took all precautions; but at least there’s that much less for the Boches to cram into their bellies. And while the Pamir was in Bergen, news came of the submarine war which the Boches are going to carry on mercilessly—blockade, forbidden zones, no warnings, and all the rest of it. Of course, nobody on the Pamir was a bit surprised by this business which makes all the Allied big bugs and the papers yell so. We and all the fellows who blow around at sea, and hear the talk everywhere, have felt the storm coming for ever so long. Only, as we aren’t officials, of course, we must have been mistaken! Well, the bomb has burst! Who is going to suffer? First, the ships that go sailing by; and then France, who will have to draw in her belt. What will they be in for at home in the way of high prices for coal, flour, butter, and the rest?

We who are used to transporting all that sort of thing, know what such a catastrophe means. But the dear public that buys at the corner grocery, and believes those things come there of themselves like the rain and the air they breathe, will be somewhat annoyed. Of course, they won’t be told how it came about, and they won’t know they are paying double or treble the former prices because ships go down at sea. As usual, they will have a lot of rotten reasons dished up for them, because it’s forbidden to give the real reason for anything. All the same, the Censor can’t prohibit the cutting-off of the gas, the electricity, the railroads, the restaurants, and everything that makes life comfy. For you may be sure the Boches aren’t going to do things by halves. Here, where we’re near them, people have information, and we have picked up a good deal at Bergen and Christiansund, where I am writing while our planks and joists are being loaded. It’s a good thing that the Pamir is here to take the wood, for all the Norwegian boats have orders to lie low wherever they may be without stirring, on account of the blockade, and I beg you to believe there are millions of tons of building timber held up. Whatever will they do? It was short already! The worst is that the Dutch, the Spanish, and the other neutrals are also going to suspend their traffic because they aren’t keen either about losing their ships. Well, the Pamir will have from three thousand to thirty-two hundred tons of wood which will serve to build the barracks of the poilus, railways, and pit-props for at least one Army Corps. This is at least as useful as shells and coal and we are pleased with our cargo.

To return to the information we have gathered here, it seems that things are boiling in Russia. A lot of people think that at Petrograd and other places up there they’re about fed up with Hun influence. The Germans are putting spokes in their wheels even at Court and in the Imperial family itself. Some say that it can end only by a separate peace or a Revolution. In fact, matters look pretty dark in the opinion of those who have been there.

In Germany they talk of nothing but the submarines, and the public expect wonders. The Norwegians say that the Germans have been turning out several submarines a week for the last few months and that there are many mine-sowers among them. So, as you can believe the Boches will keep their word, navigation is going to be the devil and we shall be blown up without knowing why or how. The Pamir is nicely fixed for the first voyage after the blockade. She has to sail the entire length of the forbidden zone and our sort of patrol will be little protection. That has not changed at all in thirty months of war! But Fourgues says the Allies are rich enough to pretend that they can stand for it. Let a thousand or five thousand tons a month be sunk and still they will state in the papers that it’s all humbug, he says. But in the end the public will pay. Whether we get copped or not is of no importance at all. All that we shall have for our funeral oration will be silence everywhere. But this is nonsense. I am going to the movies to-night with Villiers, who is standing me a treat in honour of my paternity. We shall dine ashore. In three days we shall get under way for an Atlantic port which is not yet fixed. What luck if it were La Rochelle or Saint-Nazaire! I could go and embrace the little mother. Well, who lives, learns! Sailors were not meant to be with their families, and as the proverb says, “Sailor’s bride, sorrow’s bride!” I am sending you my photograph which I had taken at Bergen and which I am also sending to my wife so that she can look at me while she is waiting for the baby. You will see that I am well and that the war agrees with me. You know that I mean what I have written on the photo. Good luck, old friend, and here’s till we meet again.

Official Statement (end of February, 1917)

The German wireless reports the sinking of the Pamir, which is overdue.

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND

Transcriber’s notes.

Obvious typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected silently. Ambiguous hyphenation has been removed or retained according to the prevailing style for the period. Inconsistent hyphenation has been normalised.

A half-title page (blank except for the book title) and a title reiteration have been omitted from the front matter.

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- THE ODYSSEY OF A TORPEDOED TRAMP
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