The City of Comrades

by Basil King

I spoke just now of riding tempests and zephyrs, and something like that it was to plow along at every ounce of steam, with cross seas, head seas, seas abeam, and seas abaft, as each new zigzag caught them. On the roaring of the wind and the plunge and thunder of the waves one rose into regions of tumultuous play where life and death were the stakes. I saw no signs of fear, and still less of panic; nor, so far as the eye could read, anything more than a sporting excitement. One would have said that our peril was accepted as being all in the game, part of the day’s work. By the end of 1916 Atlantic travelers had come to take the submarine for granted, just as the statesmen of Plantagenet and Tudor times took the headsman’s block as one of the natural risks of going into politics.

But we looked instinctively for a periscope. It is not an easy thing for any one to see, and for me it was more difficult than for most. I saw none; or I saw a hundred. With the imperfect vision of my one eye the crests of the billows bristled with moving four-inch pipes; and then suddenly all would disappear and I saw nothing but the waves curling upward into coronets of foam with veils of trailing lace.

Not that I was worse off in this respect than my fellow-travelers. As they ran for their boats they would pause, take a hurried look at the seas, exclaiming, “There it is!” and then, more doubtfully, “No, no!” all in one breath. The “No, no!” was generally uttered in a tone of disappointment, since to cross the ocean and sight no submarine would have been like journeying through Egypt and missing the pyramids.

And yet our danger was apparent. Only a fortnight before the Kamouraska, sister ship to the Assiniboia, had been sent to the bottom in these very waters, with great loss of life. Of the tragedy the papers had given us realistic pictures that were fresh in all our minds. There was a preliminary scene on board not unlike the one we were enacting. We saw later a shell bursting on the deck, somewhere amidships. We saw the passengers and crew taking to the boats with shells kicking up geysers among them as they tried to get away. We saw the great ship sticking as straight up out of the water as a Cleopatra’s Needle, before going slowly down. We saw the U-boat herself lying on the water like a crocodile, some four thousand yards away; we saw Queenstown as a morgue. All this was as vividly in our minds as a rehearsal to the actors of a play; and yet we were probably no more nervous than the company on a first night when the curtain is going up.

The word went round that it was the fate of the Kamouraska, with the futility of her surrender as a means of saving the passengers’ lives, that prompted our captain to flight and fight. Our wireless calls were undoubtedly going up and down the Irish coast and out into the ocean. Within an hour or two, if we could hold out so long, destroyers would be rushing to our rescue. We had nothing to be terribly afraid of with more than an imaginative fear.

That imaginative fear was quickened by the seemingly maddened action of our ship. I can best describe her as a leviathan gone insane. If insanity were to overtake a whale it would probably splash the deep in some such frenzy as this—so many angles out of the course one way—then a violent heeling over—so many angles out of the course another way—anyway, anywhere, anything—to get out of that straight, staid line from port to port which makes an ocean-going ship a liner. I admit that in this wild, erratic dashing there was something that alarmed us, and something, too, that made us laugh. It was the comic side of madness, in which you can hardly see the terrible because of the grotesque.

By the time we reached life-boat No. 7 there were many signs that neither officers nor passengers were going to take more chances than they were obliged to. At No. 5 on one side of us a young officer was on top, peeling off the tarpaulin covering. At No. 9 on the other side some of the crew were already mounted, examining supplies and oars. At our own boat, cranks were being fitted to the davits to swing the boat outward. All along the line similar preparations were in progress, while men and women—luckily we had no children on board—carrying such wraps and hand-bags as they might reasonably take, stood in groups, waiting for what was to happen next.

Our view of the sea was largely cut off here by the bulk of the life-boats, though wherever there was a chink there was also a cluster of heads. So many saw periscopes—and so many didn’t see them—that it became a mild joke. In general we surmised that if a U-boat was cruising round us at all she had only been porpoising—sticking up her periscope for a second or two to get a look round, and withdrawing it before it could be seen by any eye not on that very spot.

The girl in the yashmak and I arrived so late on the scene that there were no places left by the rail, and we were obliged to content ourselves with second-hand information as to what was taking place. Our excitement had, therefore, a lack of point, like that of the small boy behind the line of grown-up people watching a procession. We fell back in the end into a kind of alcove, where, being partially protected from wind and tumult, we could speak to each other without shouting.