I never had a chance to forget the English part of me, though. I couldn't very well. You see the solicitors send me a notice every now and then telling me how good my chances are of inheriting a thirty-three-million dollar estate and a couple of dozen titles on the side.
Well, I don't care what I shipped on so long as it had a prow and a stern and kept afloat. They held me three months in the naval station waiting for a ship, and at last I got one—and what a one! An old oil tank! Ever see an oil collier? It resembles one of the countries of Europe. Which one? Greece.
Grease everywhere. You eat grease and you drink grease and you sleep grease and you breathe grease. You never get it off your hands or your clothes or your disposition until you land.
I was commissary. That meant I had charge of the cook and bought supplies and dished out food and made up the bill of fare. But I might as well have saved myself the trouble of that, because every little thing tasted alike. Why wouldn't it, with eighty-three barrels of oil on board?
None of us wore our uniforms. What was the use? We were saving them for London or Paris, and it's lucky we did! Instead, we slapped on our overalls—"dungarees," we call them in the navy. We looked like a crowd of rough-necks, instead of a crew of snappy bluejackets.
We left some time in September, and steamed up to Nova Scotia, then across. We had a speedy ship, all right. Eight knots was the best she was known to make. Say, did it give you the jumps! It sure did! I could walk a heap faster than that old tug could steam at full speed. It seemed as though every raider and submarine in the Zone would line up in a row and take a shot or two at us—it was too easy to miss.
We had rough weather all the way. That and grease are about all that happened until we hit the Zone. There we met our convoy—a British flagship, a number of merchantmen, and a flock of torpedo-boats.
My pal was a fellow from Newark, New Jersey, Bill Willsie. He was out for excitement.
"I certainly hope something will break before we land," he'd say, "so that I can have a real yarn to spin for the folks back home."