I'm a home-loving man. I don't ask anything better of life than my little house in the country, with the wife bustling about and the kids waiting for a game of ball or a tramp in the woods.
Yes, I'm a peace-lover, but I'm the kind of peace-lover who wouldn't quit this war a minute before the German empire is wiped off the map. I'm going to stand by until that day comes to pass—as come it will!
I'd like to tear the heart out of every German for the work they have done to the French and British and Scotch and Irish—oh, I know what I'm talking about. Yes, you do, if you stay in Havre long enough. You can get all your facts first hand.
Just wander down to the station every other evening when the big seven-thirty express thunders in with her load of returned British prisoners. Yes, you can see with your own two eyes what German methods are, and I tell you it makes a man, who is a man, ready to give the last drop of blood in him to stamp out a nation that treats men that way—and what's worse—women and children. . . .
I'd been in the navy five years as a bugler. You are on the bridge all the time, standing by for duty. We were assigned to one of the prettiest yachts afloat. It was originally the famous pleasure boat of a great New York multi-millionaire. She certainly was a nifty craft—about three hundred feet long, almost as big as a destroyer, and graceful as a swan in the water.
There must have been great parties aboard her in the old days, and I wonder how she felt when they knocked out her mahogany staterooms and hauled down her real lace curtains and tore up her fine saloons, for transport duty.
Nothing classy about her then—just dirt and grease and the smell of pork and beans. As for her color, she was gray, same as any little ten-cent tug. But her lines didn't change. She was like a fine lady who takes off her ball gown and puts on rags, and in spite of it you can tell she's a fine lady through and through.
We carried the first American troops to land in France. The very first. That was making history, wasn't it? It seemed right and fit that the proud little yacht should have the glory of taking the first batch of Yankees to foreign shores.
It was a rough trip, though, and we felt sorry for the boys whose sea travels had been limited to the ferryboat between Hoboken and New York. Rough weather on shipboard is no joke. You can talk about the hardships of the trenches, but how about being aboard a pitching vessel, when you can't even get a light in your galley ranges, which means no food can be cooked and a steady diet of hard tack and bully beef?
Oh, we hadn't any kick coming. It was all part of the game, but we did wish the sea would calm down a bit and the fog lift. I never saw such a fog in all my days. From the minute we left, it wrapped itself around us like a damp blanket. You could hardly see your hand before your face. We didn't need a smoke curtain that trip—nature provided one for us, all made to order.