Part 1 (1/2)
The A.E.F.
by Heywood Broun.
CHAPTER I
THE BIG POND
”Voila un sousmarin,” said a sailor, as he stuck his head through the doorway of the smoking room. The man with aces and eights dropped, but the player across the table had three sevens, and he waited for a translation. It came from the little gun on the afterdeck. The gun said ”Bang!” and in a few seconds it repeated ”Bang!” I heard the second shot from my stateroom, but before I had adjusted my lifebelt the gun fired at the submarine once more.
A cheer followed this shot. No Yale eleven, or even Harvard for that matter, ever heard such a cheer. It was as if the shout for the first touchdown and for the last one and for all the field goals and long gains had been thrown into one. There was something in the cheer, too, of a long drawn ”ho-old 'em.”
I looked out the porthole and asked an ambulance man: ”Did we get her then?”
”No, but we almost did,” he answered. ”There she is,” he added. ”That's the periscope.”
Following the direction of his finger I found a stray beanpole thrust somewhat carelessly into the ocean. It came out of a wave top with a rakish tilt. Probably ours was the angle, for the steamer was cutting the ocean into jigsaw sections as we careened away for dear life, now with a zig and then with a zag, seeking safety in drunken flight. When I reached the deck, steamer and pa.s.sengers seemed to be doing as well as could be expected, and even better.
The periscope was falling astern, and the three hundred pa.s.sengers, mostly ambulance drivers and Red Cross nurses, were lined along the rail, rooting. Some of the girls stood on top of the rail and others climbed up to the lifeboats, which were as good as a row of boxes. It was distinctly a home team crowd. n.o.body cheered for the submarine. The only pa.s.senger who showed fright was a chap who rushed up and down the deck loudly shouting: ”Don't get excited.”
”Give 'em h.e.l.l,” said a home town fan and shook his fist in the direction of the submarine. The gunner fired his fourth shot and this time he was far short in his calculation.
”It's a question of whether we get her first or she gets us, isn't it?”
asked an old lady in about the tone she would have used in asking a popular lecturer whether or not he thought Hamlet was really mad. Such neutrality was beyond me. I couldn't help expressing a fervent hope that the contest would be won by our steamer. It was the bulliest sort of a game, and a pleasant afternoon, too, but one pa.s.senger was no more than mildly interested. W. K. Vanderbilt did not put on a life preserver nor did he leave his deck chair. He sat up just a bit and watched the whole affair tolerantly. After all the submarine captain was a stranger to him.
Our fifth and final shot was the best. It hit the periscope or thereabouts. The sh.e.l.l did not rebound and there was a patch of oil on the surface of the water. The beanpole disappeared. The captain left the bridge and went to the smoking room. He called for cognac.
”Il est mort,” said he, with a sweep of his right hand.
”He says we sunk her,” explained the man who spoke French.
The captain said the submarine had fired one torpedo and had missed the steamer by about ninety feet. The U-boat captain must have taken his eye off the boat, or sliced or committed some technical blunder or other, for he missed an easy shot. Even German efficiency cannot eradicate the blessed amateur. May his thumbs never grow less!
We looked at the chart and found that our s.h.i.+p was more than seven hundred miles from the nearest land. It seemed a lonely ocean.
One man came through the crisis with complete triumph. As soon as the submarine was sighted, the smoking room steward locked the cigar chest and the wine closet. Not until then did he go below for his lifebelt.
Reviewing my own emotions, I found that I had not been frightened quite as badly as I expected. The submarine didn't begin to scare me as much as the first act of ”The Thirteenth Chair,” but still I could hardly lay claim to calm, for I had not spoken one of the appropriate speeches which came to my mind after the attack. The only thing to which I could point with pride was the fact that before putting on my lifebelt I paused to open a box of candy, and went on deck to face destruction, or what not, with a caramel between my teeth. But before the hour was up I was sunk indeed.
It was submarine this and sousmarin that in the smoking room. The U-boats lurked in every corner. One man had seen two and at the next table was a chap who had seen three. There was the fellow who had sighted the periscope first of all, the man who had seen the wake of the torpedo, and the littlest ambulance driver who had sighted the submarine through the bathroom window while immersed in the tub. He was the man who had started for the deck with nothing more about him than a lifebelt and had been turned back.
”I wonder,” said a pa.s.senger, ”whether those submarines have wireless?
Do you suppose now that boat could send messages on ahead and ask other U-boats to look after us?” And just then the gun on the forward deck went ”Bang.”
It was the meanest and most inappropriate sound I ever heard. It was an anti-climax of the most vicious sort. It was bad form, bad art, bad everything. I felt a little sick, and one of the contributing emotions was a sort of fearfully poignant boredom. I tried to remember just what the law of averages was and to compute as rapidly as possible the chances of the vessel to complete two more days of travel if attacked by a submarine every hour.
”The ocean is full of the d.a.m.n things,” said the man at the next table petulantly.