But few of the present passengers have ever been on board a ship before. Indeed, many of us never saw the ocean until last week. War and its appurtenances are for the present a game, full of interesting surprises and wonderful thrills. It is surprising, for instance, however good your appetite may have been in camp, to find how much more you can eat on board ship; and it is thrilling, if you happen to be a rustic beauty from a very small town in Central Iowa, to find yourself dancing the one-step, in a life-jacket, with a total stranger in uniform, upon an undulating deck to the music of a full military band.
So most of us have entered upon the business with all the misguided enthusiasm of the gentleman who once blacked himself all over to play “Othello.” Some of us sleep in our clothes; others carry all their valuables about their person; not a few donned patent life-saving contraptions before we cleared Sandy Hook. But no one appears the least nervous: there is a pleasurable excitement about everything. And we listen with intense respect to the blood-curdling reminiscences of the crew, particularly the stewards. All our cabin stewards have been torpedoed at least three times, and every single one of them was on board the Lusitania when she was sunk. The survivors of the Lusitania must be almost as numerous by this time as the original ship’s company of the Mayflower.
CHAPTER THREE
THE LOWER DECK
If you clamber down the accommodation ladder on to the well-deck amidships, you will find yourself in a world which will enable you to contemplate War from yet another angle.
For a guide and director I can confidently recommend Mr. Al Thompson, late of Springfield, Illinois—“No, sir, not Massachusetts!” he will be careful to inform you—now a seasoned ornament of a Trench Mortar Battery.
“We sure are one dandy outfit,” he observes modestly. “Two hundred roughnecks! I’ll make you known to a few. There’s Eddie Gillette: you seen him box last night, out on the forward deck there? Yep? Well, you certainly seen something!”
We certainly had. Boxing is an ideal pastime for a large, virile, and closely packed community, for several reasons. In the first place, it requires very little space. A twelve-foot ring will do: indeed, towards the end of an exciting bout the combatants can—or must—make shift with mere elbow-room. In the second, the novice extracts quite as much exercise and excitement from the sport as the expert—possibly more. Thirdly and most important, boxing fulfils the cardinal principle of providing for the greatest good of the greatest number, because it affords far more undiluted happiness to the spectators than to the performers. Last night, for instance, when Mr. Hank Magraw (weight two hundred pounds), a gladiator mainly conspicuous for unruffled urbanity and entire ignorance of the rules of boxing, growing a trifle restive under the cumulative effect of three consecutive taps upon the point of the chin from an opponent half his size, suddenly gathered that gentleman into his arms and endeavoured to stuff him down one of those trumpet-mouthed ventilators which lead to the stokehold, the spectators voiced their appreciation by a vociferous encore.
A wonderful sight these spectators are. They are banked up all around the well-deck, forming a deep pit, in the bottom of which two boxers gyrate, clash, and recoil like nutshells in a whirlpool. Tier upon tier they rise—with their long, lean, American bodies, and tense, brown, American faces—seated in concentric circles on the deck itself, perched on hatches and deck-houses and sky-lights, clinging to davits and ventilators, or hanging in clusters from the rigging—all yelling themselves hoarse.