“Gawd! Why don’t they just use shells stuffed with sawdust? It wouldn’t take any more than that to give them theirs!”
I doubt if this war will be won in so childish a manner. But it is pleasant for an officer to command such children.
PART II
IN THE ADRIATIC
Adriatic Sea, 25 September.
THE ships keep shelter in Pola and Cattaro, and will not come out! There is nothing Austrian in sight except the names on the maps and the silent coasts. We continue, however, to sail along the shore, we brave their submarines, their mines, their torpedo-boats. Like the knights of the Crusades challenging their adversaries, we go to offer ourselves to their attack. But they do not issue forth.
Like a great army corps that waits the engagement, the armored squadrons run the barrage of Otranto. They are the lions of our naval menagerie. Claws sheathed, jaws closed, they strain their ears for the call of the cruisers.... In small groups the torpedo-destroyers circle round them, sweeping the road where the great beasts of battle are about to pass, and watching to see that no submarine is prowling on the path.
Further north on the skirts of the Adriatic great-lunged battleships are holding the jungle. The cruisers know no rest; they pursue their anxious watch along the outposts, traversing the waves and piercing the sky. Upon their observations, in sun and shadow, depends the safety of the great battleships. Theirs is the joy of spying the enemy upon the horizon, of rushing forward, of receiving the first shots and launching the first shells, of so calculating the retreat as to draw the enemy within range of the battleships’ guns.
We are three brothers—the Ernest Renan, the Edgar Quinet, are as beautiful and majestic as the Waldeck-Rousseau. Their six stacks belch forth the same clouds. Engaged in the same work, all are acquainted with the same fatigue. Older and less sturdy, the Gambetta, the Ferry, the Hugo, and the Michelet have the same tasks. Their family is known by its four smokestacks.
From Otranto to Fano, and along its whole shadowy line, the seven cruisers blockade the Adriatic at the end of which the Austrians are entrenched. From the summit of the bridge one can see for ten miles; that is why we navigate at twenty miles’ distance, on circuits of short circumference, ever the same. The cruisers never sight each other, but each knows that below the horizon a brother ship is within reach and on guard. Sometimes the ceaseless rhythm of their march brings them to the confines of their “beat,” and they sight each others’ masts glistening on the horizon like the bayonets of a double sentry. Then both tack about, and go their opposite directions; the masts sink out of sight, the smoke drifts away, and nothing is left but a solitary vigil on a deserted sea.
Since our departure from Toulon the Waldeck-Rousseau has been in constant motion. In the waste of waters the clamors of the world are stilled. We have commenced the pilgrimage known to so many generations of sailors. At a venture we halt some small game—packet-boats, three-masted schooners, or steamers, which submit to our examination. They bring us a faint echo of human affairs—Italians, Greeks, or Spaniards—and are fraught with I know not what continental aroma. We send these timid travelers on their voyage; their examination is but play; the important affair lies up there at Pola or Cattaro. Every week after coaling—which we do at sea—we go and shake our fists at the enemy, crying shame upon him in his retreat and challenging him to an encounter. Many times already we have gone up there in the night; in the daytime we have circled about Lissa, the Dalmatian Isles, and even further still. Far behind us the battleships follow, alert for the signal—“Enemy in sight!” But our guns are leveled in vain; in vain our eyes face the tracery of sun and shadow. Nothing appears within our range except the motionless shores, the slumbering isles—never a quarry.