Of this cautious being, my comrade and I are the temporary brain. Around us perhaps lurk Austrian destroyers, also invisible and silent, which may be launching at us, as they pass, their pointed torpedoes. Before we have suspected that death prowls there, they will have perceived a gigantic hulk making a spot in the darkness. Let the two officers on watch, safeguarding the ship, have a second of forgetfulness or fatigue, and a thousand men may be lost in the abyss whence none returns. In us these thousand sailors place implicit confidence. If disaster should happen, they would forgive us in their last agony, because they know that no human power could have prevented it. Presently, when we lie down on our bunks, worn out with the strain, we shall deliver our lives over to our successors without a thought. The two watchers on the bridge are the guardian angels of the crew.
That is the greatness of our vocation. Nowhere in this war, in which the battlefields will have seen so much heroism, will there be a heavier task imposed on leaders of men. No general or sergeant could commit a mistake which would annihilate his army or his squad in a single instant. The ball kills only one man, the shell carries off only a file; and the mine spares those at a distance. Every fighter on land has his chance of surviving the worst disaster, and the most careless officer will never have upon his conscience the death of all the men he has commanded.
But a boat is a prison, more confining than stones and bars and chains; we are suspended over the abyss. Naval catastrophes are like a vomit from hell; no other catastrophe crushes so many lives at a single stroke. Lives and goods lost together! Terrible words, which cannot be said of cataclysms on land. Earthquakes, fires leave reminders, ruins, witnesses of that which was.... But the ocean tears from her surface a handful of metal and men, and sends them to rot in her bowels. And the next day the unchangeable deeps smile their eternal smile.
Long ago the sea knew the whole art of murder. Our diabolical genius had to add tenfold to the horror. Human ingenuity has invented the mine, more remorseless than a hundred reefs; the torpedo, more destructive than a hurricane, and those explosives which tear to pieces still living tissue into projectiles of flesh.
The slow night ebbs away. These forebodings of the fate of sailors invade the souls of the watchers, and make them long to vanquish the specters of the shadow. For to die is nothing if one has been able to save others. From the interior of the ship, from the hammocks and the posts of the watch, rises the voice of a hundred trusting hearts. That unity of appeal creates this thing which has neither form nor law, but which draws its strength from the very depths of the soul, in that affection, that complete devotion of oneself: Duty.
Tedious as are the hours filled with such distressing thoughts, the night, nevertheless, finally begins to fade. The East pales and the mists disappear and unveil the depths of the sky, where a few faint stars go out one after the other before the approach of the sun. The light slowly conquers the limits of space, and sea and ships take on form and substance. From the South a cruiser emerges, gray as the waves through which it comes, the dawn strips it of its veil, moulds its shape, reveals the masts and the smoke from its stacks. Farther away there is a row of motionless points on the surface of the water; these are the masts of the ironclads that have followed on our track. Others still farther South are entirely invisible.
The mountains of Austria and Montenegro take possession of a segment of the sky; their white peaks have a scarlet hem. They form a wall stretching from North to South, of which the ravines, the escarpments and the summits are still buried in mist. Our cruiser gets orders to bear farther northward, while the other cruisers deploy between it and the ironclads. It puts on speed, its whole bulk quivering under its armor. When it has taken position, it can still see its neighbor in the South, and the stacks of the ship behind it. But only puffs of smoke reveal the presence of the other ships, of which the most distant is opposite Antivari or St. John of Medua, fifty kilometers away.
The entire “naval army” bears off to the right and moves toward the enemy coast, which every moment renders clearer. I take the watch, which has been resigned before midnight. A few hours of uneasy sleep have left me with the taste of ashes in my mouth, and a painful fluttering in my eyelids. But have we not all lived in this way for I know not how many weeks? And should one not whip up his blood in the face of approaching danger? And can one stay drowsy in the marvel of this dawn?
Here is light in all its purity and perfection. The blue of a young girl’s eyes, or the delicate green of April meadows, seem gross and hard in comparison with this light. It is quiet, yet alive with beauty. It enchants like a perfume; it evokes a solemn rapture. Surely the robes of angels must be woven from rays of such light.