The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me | Page 4

France. And what proud pageants
they were! Walking at the head of the line were the little limping
handful of veterans of the Civil War. After them came the middle-aged
huskies of the Spanish War, and then, so very young, so boyish and so
very solemn, came the soldiers for the great war--the volunteers, the
National Guard, the soldiers of the new army; half accoutred, clad in
nondescript uniforms, but proud and incorrigibly young. There had
been banquets the week before, and speeches and flag rituals in public,
but the night before, there had been tears and good-byes across the land.
And all this in a few weeks; indeed it began during the long days in
which we two sailed through the gulf stream, we two whose departure
from our towns had seemed such a bold and hazardous adventure.
When one man leaves a town upon an unusual enterprise, it may look
foolhardy; but when a hundred leave upon the same adventure, it seems
commonplace. The danger in some way seems to be divided by the
numbers. Yet in truth, numbers often multiply the danger. There was
little danger for Henry and me on the good ship Espagne with Red
Cross stenographers and nurses and ambulance drivers and Y. M. C. A.
workers. No particular advantage would come to the German arms by
torpedoing us. But as the Espagne, carrying her peaceful passengers, all
hurrying to Europe on merciful errands, passed down the river and into
the harbour that afternoon, we had seen a great grey German monster
passenger boat, an interned leviathan of the sea in her dock. We had

been told of how cunningly the Germans had scuttled her; how they
had carefully relaid electric wires so that every strand had to be
retraced to and from its source, how they had turned the course of water
pipes, all over the ship, how they had drawn bolts and with blow-pipes
had rotted nuts and rods far in the dark places of the ship's interior, how
they had scientifically disarranged her boilers so that they would not
make steam, and as we saw the German boat looming up, deck upon
deck, a floating citadel, with her bristling guns, we thought what a prize
she would be when she put out to sea loaded to the guards with those
handsome boys whom we had been seeing hustling about the country
as they went to their training camps. Even to consider these things gave
us a feeling of panic, and the recollection of the big boat in the dock
began to bring the war to us, more vividly than it had come before. And
then our first real martial adventure happened, thus:
As we leaned over the rail that first night talking of many things, in the
blackness, without a glimmer from any porthole, with the decks as dark
as Egypt, the ship shot ahead at twenty knots an hour. In peace times it
would be regarded as a crazy man's deed, to go whizzing along at full
speed without lights. Henry had taken two long puffs on his cigar when
out from the murk behind us came a hand that tapped his shoulder, and
then a voice spoke:
"You'll have to put out that cigar, sir. A submarine could see that five
miles on a night like this!"
So Henry doused his light, and the war came right home to us.
The next day was uniform day on the boat, and the war came a bit
nearer to us than ever. Scores of good people who had come on the boat
in civilian clothes, donned their uniforms that second day; mostly Red
Cross or Y. M. C. A. or American ambulance or Field Service uniforms.
We did not don our uniforms, though Henry believed that we should at
least have a dress rehearsal. The only regular uniforms on board were
worn by a little handful of French soldiers, straggling home from a
French political mission to America, and these French soldiers were the
only passengers on the boat who had errands to France connected with
the destructive side of the war. So not until the uniforms blazed out

gorgeously did we realize what an elaborate and important business had
sprung up in the reconstructive side of war. Here we saw a whole ship's
company--hundreds of busy and successful men and women, one of
scores and scores of ship's companies like it, that had been hurrying
across the ocean every few days for three years, devoted not to trading
upon the war, not to exploiting the war, not even to expediting the
business of "the gentle art of murdering," but devoted to saving the
waste of war!
As the days passed, and "we sailed and we sailed," a sort of denatured
pirate craft