Mare Nostrum (Our Sea): A Novel

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

The vessel was no longer in a commercial harbor. It had gone to a military harbor,—a narrow river winding through the interior of the city, dividing it in two. A great drawbridge put in communication the two shores bordered with vast constructions and high chimneys, naval shops, warehouses, arsenals, and dry-docks for cleaning up the boats. Tug-boats were continually stirring up its green and miry waters. Steamers undergoing repairs were lined up the length of the break-waters undergoing a continual pounding that made their plates resound. Lighters topped with hills of pit coal were going slowly to take their position along the flanks of the ships. Under the drawbridge launches were coming and going from the warships, leaving on the floating piers the crews celebrating their shore-leave with scandalous uproar.

The Mare Nostrum remained isolated while the workmen from the arsenal were installing on the poop rapid-fire guns and the wireless telegraph apparatus. No one could come aboard that did not belong to the crew.

The sailors' families were waiting for them on the wharf, and Caragol had occasion to become acquainted with many Breton women,—mothers, sisters, or fiancées of his new friends. He liked these women: they were dressed in black with full skirts, and white, stiff caps which brought to his mind the wimples of the nuns…. Some tall, stout girls with blue and candid eyes laughed at the Spaniard without understanding a single word. The old women with faces as dark and wrinkled as winter apples touched glasses with Caragol in the low cafes near the port. They all could do honor to a goblet in an opportune moment, and had great faith in the saints. The cook did not require anything more…. Most excellent and charming people!

Certain lads decorated with the Croix de Guerre used to relate their experiences to him. They were survivors of the battalion of marines who defended Dixmude. After the battle of the Marne they had been sent to intercept the enemy on the side of Flanders. There were not more than six thousand of them and, aided by a Belgian division, they had sustained the onrush of an entire army. Their resistance had lasted for weeks:—a combat of barricades in the street, of struggles the length of the canal with the bloodiness of the ancient piratical forays. The officers had shouted their orders with broken swords and bandaged heads. The men had fought on without thinking of their wounds, covered with blood, until they fell down dead.

Caragol, hitherto little interested in military affairs, became most enthusiastic when relating this heroic struggle to Ferragut, simply because his new friends had taken part in it.

"Many died, Captain…. Almost half of them. But the Germans couldn't make any headway…. Then, on learning that the marines had been no more than six thousand, the generals tore their hair. So great was their wrath! They had supposed that they were confronted by dozens of thousands…. It was just great to hear the lads relate what they did there."

Among these "lads" wounded in the war, who had passed to the naval reserve and were manning the Mare Nostrum, one was especially distinguished by the old man's partiality. He could talk to him in Spanish, because of his transatlantic voyages, and besides he had been born in Vannes.

If the youth ever approached the cook's dominions he was invariably met with a smile of invitation. "A refresco, Vicente?" The best seat was for him. Caragol had forgotten his name as not worth while. Since he came from Vannes, he could not have any other name but Vicente.

The first day that they chatted together, the marine, in love with his country, described to the cook the beauties of Morbihan,—a great interior sea surrounded with groves and with islands covered with pines. Among the venerable antiquities of the city was the Gothic cathedral with its many tombs, among them that of a Spanish saint,—St. Vicente Ferrer.

This gave a tug at Caragol's heart-strings. He had never before bothered to find out where the famous apostle of Valencia was entombed…. He recalled suddenly a strophe of the songs of praise that the devotees of his land used to sing before the altars of this saint. Sure enough he had gone to die in "Vannes, in Brittainy,"—a mere geographical name which until then had lacked any significance for him…. And so this lad was from Vannes? Nothing more was needed to make Caragol regard him with the respect due to one born in a miraculous country.