I turned into my own bunk and slept well until next morning, when I found the commander also awake and possessed of a thirst which knew no bounds. There was, of course, no drinking-water on the train, but I rushed him to the restaurant of the next station where we stopped, and he seized a carafe of water and put it to his lips with such avidity that you could almost hear the water sizzle as it passed down his throat. He turned out to be a delightful fellow. He was commander of a destroyer and had spent dreary and terrible weeks in his little craft watching for submarines. The monotony and discomfort of such a life cannot be imagined, as these ships are so small that their motion is incessant and they have to go out in the dirtiest of weather. There is hardly ever a chance to cook meals, and those on board must eat what and how they can. For weeks and weeks nothing happens, but my commander had had the good luck on his last trip to get a sub, and had received his thirty-six hours’ leave in consequence. Small wonder that he and his colleagues sought some relief in honor of the great event!
At the next station my French general and I got a cup of coffee. Sugar was at that time taboo, and as, thanks to my army friends, I had my pockets full of this precious stuff, I offered him some in place of the awful saccharine, which he accepted gratefully and then told me that he was going on his first vacation in two years to spend with his family in a little watering resort this side of Brest. Sure enough at the next station, as he got out, a charming boy and girl, browned by the sun, rushed up to him and fairly smothered him with kisses. It looked for all the world like a scene at a Long Island station in August, when the various New York fathers commute on a Friday afternoon to spend Saturday and Sunday with their families by the sea.
I found my daughter Alice waiting for me at the station in Brest, and on the way to the little apartment which she and Miss McKim occupied together, she told me that Admiral Wilson wanted to meet me before my departure on the transport the same evening. She begged me to support her if he denounced jazz music, against which he had a particular hatred, for she had always insisted to him that the sailors loved it and that in time of war they certainly should have anything they wanted.
In the afternoon the admiral’s band gave a concert in the public square, and I, of course, attended it and met the bandmaster and his players, who did very good work, several of them having been members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. They begged me to conduct them in one of the numbers, and I took up the stick and solemnly played through the “William Tell Overture” with them. At the end I saw Admiral Wilson on the balcony of his apartment applauding vociferously, and he presently came running, bareheaded, across the square to greet me. Almost the first thing he said was: “Doctor, don’t you think jazz music is horrible? It destroys all taste for real music.” “Indeed I heartily agree with you,” I answered. Whereupon my daughter Alice turned on me and said, “Coward!” implying that as the admiral was the autocrat of Brest I did not wish to brave his wrath even in order to please my daughter. But indeed I was thoroughly in accord with him; and I wish that either some popular substitute could be found for the interminable jazz that is ravaging not only our country but all Europe, or that a genius would come along who would pour into this very low form of art some real emotion which, welling from the very heart of man, might give life to what is at present but a nervous excitement.
That evening I went on board the transport America, and sailed for home. I found the voyage exceedingly interesting. The ship had been a Hamburg passenger liner, the Amerika, taken over after her internment by our navy; the “k” having been carefully removed and an American “c” substituted. Various German signs had been scratched out, but the table and bed linen, as well as the knives and forks, still bore the mystic initials, H. A. P. A. G.—Hamburg Amerika Paketfahrt Actien Gesellschaft.
I was the proud occupant of a cabin and bathroom of the so-called “Roosevelt” suite, which the ex-President had occupied during his trip around the world, and the faucets over the bathtub still bore the signs “Kalt,” “Warm,” and “Gemischt.” The various luxurious furnishings of the ship showed the wear and tear of army-transport usage. The marble was cracked and the electric bells did not ring.
The first-class cabins were occupied by several hundred officers, a curious mixture of men, some returning on leave or to become instructors in the officers’ camps, or being mustered out of service, either for ill health, drunkenness, or incompetence. For days I was pursued, even into my cabin, by a man from a Western city who had enlisted as a dentist. He was evidently out of his mind and was to be mustered out of the service on his return home. He had conceived the mysterious idea that I could influence the powers that be to have him reinstated, and I finally found the glitter in his eye so ominous that I reported him to the colonel in command and he promptly had him put under medical observation. Two days later his companions in the hospital ward, whom he had already annoyed and frightened by suddenly grabbing their legs at night, found him in the bathroom with his throat partly cut by his razor; and I confess that I was glad when I heard that he had been put into a cabin by himself, with a soldier guarding the door.
We were, of course, under army regulations and in many respects life was much stricter than on the passenger liners. We were compelled to wear life-preservers almost the entire voyage and no lights were permitted after sundown. We were not told at which American port we were to land, and I was much astonished one morning to find our ship anchored in Boston Harbor alongside the old 1812 frigate Constitution, whose broadside-guns looked delightfully picturesque and inefficient compared with the modern monsters I had seen in France.
During the following winter my wife and I often received visits from navy officers and sailors bearing greetings from our daughter Alice in Brest, and I remember one red-cheeked youngster who made so agreeable an impression on my wife that she invited him to return the following day, which was Sunday, for luncheon. On that morning the telephone rang. It was our old friend, Admiral William Rodgers, who asked whether he could come to luncheon. My wife said we would be delighted, but my youngest daughter Anita, who was well versed in the etiquette of the navy, called out: “Oh, we can’t have the admiral lunching with us to-day. An admiral can’t sit down at the same table with a gob!” My wife repeated this to the admiral, who insisted that it made no difference and that in war time everything was possible; that he certainly wanted to come and would be very glad to meet the “gob” who had brought greetings from Alice, of whom he was very fond. The sailor boy arrived first, and when we told him that our other guest was to be an admiral he grew pale as death, but when Rodgers arrived he was so kind to the boy that luncheon passed off fairly well, except that the boy became rigid at attention whenever the admiral spoke to him. During the luncheon Admiral Rodgers said to him: “You have just seen Mrs. Pennington in Brest?” “Yes, sir.” “And what was she doing when you saw her?” “She was selling postage-stamps, sir,” was the answer. And I have no doubt this was true, as Alice in her capacity of naval “Y” worker not only took the sailors out to picnics with swimming contests, arranged vaudeville entertainments and concerts, but in between times sold them chocolate, cigarettes, postage-stamps, picture postal-cards, lemon-drops, and ginger ale.
After luncheon my daughters discreetly took the young sailor into the front parlor in order to relieve the tension a little, and Rodgers asked me about an orchestration of the “Star-Spangled Banner” which I had made at the beginning of the war and which had aroused some attention. I had always felt that this good old English tune had a fine ring to it, provided it was played in the proper tempo, and I had given it an orchestration which developed into quite a climax on the last two lines of each verse. I sat down at the piano and played it for him, explaining the difference between this version and the old one which had been generally used before the war. He was much interested and wanted to introduce it in the navy.