“I’m not half as angry as I’d like to be. Don’t you abominate ’em, too?”
“Oh yes––I wish that Germany were one big ship and all the Germans on board, and I had a torpedo big enough to blast them all to––where they belong.”
This wish seemed to him to prove a sufficient lack of affection for the Germans, and he added, “Amen!” with a little nervous reaction into uncouth laughter.
But this was only another form of his anguish. At such times the distraught soul seems to have need of all its emotions and expressions, and to run among them like a frantic child.
Davidge’s next mood was a passionate regret for the crew, the dead engineers and sailors shattered and blasted and cast into the sea, the sufferings of the little squad that escaped into a life-boat without water or provisions or shelter from the sun and the lashing spray.
Then he pictured the misery of hunger that the ship’s cargo would have relieved. He had been reading much of late of the Armenian––what word or words could name that woe so multitudinous that, like the number of the stars, the mind refused to attempt its comprehension?
He saw one of those writhing columns winding through a rocky wilderness––old crones knocked aside to shrivel with famine, babies withering like blistered flowers from the flattened breasts of their mothers dying with hunger, fatigue, blows, violation, and despair. He thought of Poland childless and beyond pity; of the Serbian shambles. The talons of hunger a millionfold clutched him, and he groaned aloud:
“If they’d only stolen my wheat and given it to somebody––to anybody! But to pour it into the sea!”
He could not linger in that slough and stay sane. His struggling soul broke loose from the depths and hunted safety in self-ridicule:
“I might better have left the wheat at home and never have built the fool ship.”