"I wonder," said a passenger, "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 damn things," said the man at the next table petulantly.
This time the thing was a black object not more than fifty yards away. The captain signaled the gunner not to fire again and he let it be known that this was nothing but a barrel. Later it was rumored that it was a mine, but then there were all sorts of rumors during those last two days when we ran along with lifeboats swung out. There was much talk of a convoy, but none appeared.
Many passengers slept on deck and some went to meals with their lifebelts on. Everybody jumped when a plate was dropped and there was always the possibility of starting a panic by slamming a door. And so we cheered when the steamer came to the mouth of the river which leads to Bordeaux. We cheered for France from friendship. We cheered from surprise and joy when the American flag went up to the top of a high mast and we cheered a little from sheer relief because we had left the sea and the U-boats behind us.
They had been with us not a little from the beginning. Even on the first day out from New York the ship ran with all lights out and portholes shielded. Later passengers were forbidden to smoke on deck at night and once there was a lifeboat drill of a sort, but the boats were not swung out in the davits until after we met the submarine.
Early in the voyage an old lady complained to the purser because a young man in the music room insisted on playing the Dead March from "Saul." There was more cheerful music. The ambulance drivers saw to that. We had an Amherst unit and one from Leland Stanford and the boys were nineteen or thereabouts. It is well enough to say that all the romance has gone out of modern war, but you can't convince a nineteen-year-older of that when he has his first khaki on his back and his first anti-typhoid inoculation in his arm. They boasted of these billion germs and they swaggered and played banjos and sang songs. Mostly they sang at night on the pitch black upper deck. The littlest ambulance driver had a nice tenor voice and on still nights he did not care what submarine commander knew that he "learned about women from her." He and his companions rocked the stars with "She knifed me one night." Daytimes they studied French from the ground up. It was the second day out that I heard a voice from just outside my porthole inquire "E-S-T—what's that and how do you say it?" Later on the littlest ambulance driver had made marked progress and was explaining "Mon oncle a une bonne fille, mais mon père est riche."
Romance was not hard to find on the vessel. The slow waiter who limped had been wounded at the Marne, and the little fat stewardess had spent twenty-two days aboard the German raider Eitel Friedrich. There were French soldiers in the steerage and one of them had the Croix de Guerre with four palms. He had been wounded three times.
But when the ship came up the river the littlest ambulance driver—the one who knew "est" and women—summed things up and decided that he was glad to be an American. He looked around the deck at the Red Cross nurses and others who had stood along the rail and cheered in the submarine fight, and he said:
"I never would have thought it of 'em. It's kinda nice to know American women have got so much nerve."