The submarine stood out in clear, black outline against the white background of mist. The fog seemed only to make it more distinct, as it always does with objects near by. From a staff in the back broke a red and white drapeau. Afterward I learned that this was the combination of colors that made the Austrian flag. I was ignorant of it, then, though I remembered the exact colors.
So far, I could find nothing tragic or terrible in the situation. Possibly we would be in danger of considerable exposure in open boats, before other ships, summoned by wireless, would pick us up. I did not rush out as the others had done. I stood quite still, in order to calm myself, to give myself time to think what would better be done. The Ancona had come to a stop. Of that I was certain. I also knew that the ship was doomed.
But now there came another terrible crash, and another, and another, in different parts of the ship, followed by explosions and the sound of débris falling into the water and on deck. Well, they were merely destroying the wireless. Still there was no fear of death.
But now I was aware of a terrible shrieking. Everybody was in a frightened panic.
II—"THE HORROR OF WHAT I SAW"
Well, as for myself—to get excited wouldn't help. I went to my cabin as calmly as I could, determined to save what I could of my valuables. I put them in my lifebelt. I took a receipt for 20,000 lire, which I had left with the purser. I went toward the bow of the ship. I descended the staircase to the second cabin, on the way to the purser's office. A large part of the staircase had been shot away—and the horror of what I saw at the bottom of it made me instantly forget what I was going for. There lay three or four women, four or five children, and several men. Some of them were already dead, all, at least, badly wounded. I made sure two of the children were dead. The purser sprawled limply across his desk, inert, like a sack of meal that has been flung down and stays where it lies. He had been shot in the head. The blood was running bright like red paint, freshly spilt, down his back, and his hair was matted with it.
The first series of shots had wrecked this part of the ship, breaking through and carrying away whole sections of the framework. I tried to get back up the stairs. But in the slight interval of time I had consumed, enough additional shells had been discharged to finish the wreck of the staircase.
I saw that this was not what the nations call, ironically enough, "legitimate warfare," but wholesale and indiscriminate massacre. Seeing my exit that way cut off, I started through the second cabin to go up the central stairway. The sight that I ran into there was indescribable. All the passengers from the third cabin had rushed up into the second. They had altogether lost their wits. The only thing that was left them was the animal instinct for self-preservation in its most disastrous and most idiotic form. Men, women, and children were burrowing headforemost under chairs and benches and tables. I saw one man, his face pressed close against the floor sidewise, heaving a chair up in the air with his back, in an effort to efface himself.
All the while the detonations, like continuous thunder and lightning, increased the panic. Women were on their knees in mental agony, each supplicating the particular saint of the part of the country from which she came to save her from death. I pushed and shoved them by the shoulders. I took them by the legs and arms and clothes, and urged them, in Italian, to get up, to put on lifebelts, to get off the ship. I told them that, at least, they would find no security from shells under chairs and tables.
I found a poor old woman at the foot of the stairs, huddled in prayer. Her thin, gray hair straggled loose over her shoulder. I recognized her as a woman I had got acquainted with in my search for a fellow-citizen to join me in the first cabin. She was 65 years old, she had told me. She had seen two sons off to the war, and was now going to a third who had emigrated to America and lived in Pennsylvania. It was the first time she had ever crossed the ocean. She was sick of the thought of war. In the New World she would find peace and comfort for her old age, with her "Bambino," as she still called the grown-up man who was her son. So when I saw her lying there I was possessed of but one idea—to get her off alive. I told her to come with me, that I would protect her. She acquiesced, but her fright was so great that she hung limp as if she had no spine while I half dragged her to the first cabin deck.