The U-boat hunters Part 5

An Australian soldier and a girl were standing in a doorway near me watching the sh.e.l.ls burst. His was that common case--a soldier in London on leave, speculating on where the shrapnel would fall, and becoming peeved as he thought of it. "A h.e.l.l of a place for a man to come on leave! I came here to get rest and quiet, and I run into this gory mess!"

While waiting the permission of the British authorities I learned that all a correspondent's troubles do not come from foreign censorship. An American newsman had cabled over something which did not please one of our admirals then in London. Meeting that same admiral, I put in a word for my trip to the naval base, thinking that he might warm up and hurry things along for me. He warmed up, but on the side away from me. He recounted the enormous villainy of that newsman, and in conclusion said: "Perhaps, after all, the best way to do is not to allow you newspaper men to send a word at all!"

Such an air of finality! He spoke as though he owned the navy; also the press.

One now and again grows up like that. By taking care not to die, and in the absence of plucking boards, they rise to be admirals. Then side-boys, the bosun's pipes, the 13 guns coming over the side--all this ritual goes to their heads. They get to thinking after a while that the whole business is a tribute to their genius, or valor, or something or other personal. Perhaps all this one needed was a little salve; but I thought it up to some writer to fire a shot across his bows. So I came back with: "That's all very well, sir, about your not allowing a word to be sent, but there may be another point of view. There are 110,000,000 people over in our country, and some of them may not look on our navy as the sole property of its officers. They may want to know what that navy of theirs is doing over here. And perhaps no harm in telling them--or some day they may decide to have no navy at all."

Imagination was not his long suit, so he had no card to follow with. But he did glare.

After two weeks of waiting I got word from my very human London censor that I might leave for the naval base. I left from Euston Station during an air-raid. The station had been darkened hours earlier, and it was a new kind of sport going around that big black place to locate the cloak-room, and after you got the cloak-room to identify your baggage from a big tumbled pile.

I lit a cigar, and as I did a policeman jumped me for showing a light.

Stopping to light it under my hat, a tall, able woman, dragging a trunk by the strap, bowled into me. While we were in our compartments, the train all made up, there came a banging of barrage guns--bang, bang, bang--with now and then the boo-oom! of a bomb.

While we were waiting there we heard the crash of shrapnel coming through the gla.s.s roof. By and by another bunch of shrapnel fell with a fine ringing of metal on the concrete platform alongside the train. No harm done. The raiders pa.s.sed, the banging and the booming stopped; but there was then no driver and stoker for the train. They had gone with the second load of shrapnel, and we had to wait two hours while they dug up a new crew.

After three and a half hours of deck-pacing on the steamer, and twenty-two hours of sitting up straight in third-cla.s.s wooden seats, I made the naval base; and late at night though it was, there was a British naval officer at the hotel to let me know I was to report next morning to the British admiral in charge.

This admiral had a reputation in London for having no use for newspaper men. When this staff-officer asked me if I had heard of his admiral before, I told him what I heard in London. "He eats 'em alive," I was told by a big London journalist, and I repeated that now, of course without naming the journalist.

"And what do you think of that?" asked this staff-officer.

"If he tries to eat me alive I hope he chokes," I answered to that. I figured he would tell his chief that, but there had been so much boot-licking done by a couple of writers over there that, for the honor of the craft, I thought somebody ought to have a wallop at these press crushers once in a while.

This admiral is worth a paragraph, because he was a type. He was a capable man up to his limitations; a good executive, a devotee to duty; but he should have lived before printing-presses were invented. Also he, too, lacked imagination.

He was a man who acted as if priding himself on his brusqueness of language. He sat at his flat desk like a pagan image, never looked up, never said aye, no, or go to the devil when I stepped in and wished him "Good morning!"

I told him what I wanted. I wished to cruise with the American destroyers in their U-boat operations.

His answer was a No! Bing! No, sir!

"Whoops!" I said to myself. "I've come more than 4,000 miles, with a fine expense account to _Collier's_, and I'm turned down before I get going."

I spread before him my credentials--from the department and elsewhere. I spread before him a letter from Colonel Roosevelt, the same in his own handwriting. In France I could have lost my pa.s.sport and yet got along on that letter. Batteries of inspectors used to sit up and come to life at the sight of a letter in the colonel's own handwriting.

This man did not turn his head to look at what I might have. All the credentials in the world were going to have no influence with him. He repeated his No, putting about seventeen n's in the No!

Then, mildly, I told him that I thought I ought to have something more than a No; that I should have a reason to go with the No. He intimated that he didn't have to give reasons unless he wished to.

I asked him why he should not wish to? Was it not right and fair that he should give a reason? I had come more than 4,000 miles at great expense to _Collier's_, for one thing. For another--and this more important--there was an anxiety among Americans to know something of the doings of our little destroyer flotilla. They had sailed out into the East, been swallowed up in the mists of the Atlantic--that was the last we had seen of them. They were the first of our forces to come in contact with the enemy. Were they doing good work over here, or were they tied up to a dock in some port and their officers and crews roistering ash.o.r.e?

Still he said No.

Then I went on to tell him what I had told our own archaic type of admiral in London--with additions: that it was possible that we had in the United States a different idea of the navy from what the British public held; that in our own country a lot of people held the notion that the navy was not the property of the officers, not quite so much as it was the property of the people; and that holding that view, these same people thought themselves ent.i.tled to know what that navy was doing to back their faith in it. And perhaps it was not the worst policy in the world to tell them what that navy was doing.

Still he said No.

But why?

Well, for one thing (he was disintegrating a little), in the British service they did not allow civilians of any kind to go to sea with their ships in war time. That further--they allowed no reports of their work at sea to appear in the press.

I pointed out that reports of fine deeds were, nevertheless, appearing in the press; that from the London dailies of the week past I had made clippings of such, and if he cared to see them I would show them to him.

"But we allow no civilians to go cruising with ships at sea in war time.

And I will not establish a precedent now."

It was the old fetich--precedent. I thought of judges who used to hang men on precedent. He surely had what is called the mediaeval mind, with apologies to that same mediaeval age.

I pointed out that conditions in our country and his were not the same.

That there were hundreds of thousands of officers and men in the British navy; that those officers and men were regularly ash.o.r.e on liberty or leave; that they gossiped, and that hundreds of thousands of officers and men gossiping could pa.s.s the word pretty far, especially in a country where there was not a single little hamlet more than 40 miles from tide-water. With us it was different. Our nearest Atlantic port was 3,000 miles from this very naval base; and 3,000 miles farther to the Pacific coast, with no hundreds of thousands of men on liberty ash.o.r.e.

If men like myself were not allowed to tell them something, how were they ever to learn what was doing?

I wound up by telling him he was an autocrat; which disturbed his graven serenity. Autocrat and autocracy were not pleasant-sounding words just then. He snapped his head up, and for the first time looked as if he might be human.

"We have to be autocratic in war time," he barked.

"Not in everything," I barked back.

Then, and not till then, did he soften. We had a little more conversation, and then he said he wanted that night to think over the unprecedented request. He would let me know next day.

A perfect bigot; and yet there were worse than he. He dared to say what he thought about the rights of his station. Some of his judgments may have been childish, but his convictions were deep and honest. I respected him, and later came to have almost a liking for him.

I have expended many paragraphs in telling of this interview, but it is meant to be more than a statement of one American correspondent. It is meant to explain a point of view which Americans may find it hard work to understand. That admiral in charge of our naval base can be multiplied all the world over. We have them in our own departments.

While waiting the admiral's pleasure I had a look at the port. A fine harbor, a beautiful harbor, but disfigured now by big, ugly war-buildings. The houses of the port set mostly up on terraces. There were several streets, but only one real one in the place, and that ran along the waterside. All the pubs of the port were naturally located on this waterside street, and so no tired seafarer had to walk far to get a drink. Not many of our fellows were to be seen on the streets in daylight; but at night they were plentiful. A couple of movie theatres took care of about three hundred of them; the rest walked the waterside street. There was a port order there that no sailor of ours could stay in a pub after eight in the evening, so at one minute past eight that waterside street looked like a naval parade. For the rest the port offered little or nothing to tempt a man. It was as rainy a place as ever I was in, and the back streets were crowded with children playing.

Barefooted, healthy children! If they had not been healthy the weather would surely have killed them off. It was a most moral port, too; too moral for some people, who thought to put a little life into the place by making nightly calls there, and made the nightly calls till a local clergyman protested from the altar, whereupon some muscular young Christians ran the visitors back aboard their train and out of the port's history.

Next day the admiral gave me permission to make a cruise with our destroyers. He seemed to be giving it in the same stubborn fashion that he had at first refused it--as though he saw his duty in so doing. I was told that he said he did not think much of my manners; which, of course, worried me.

I knew quite a few officers in the navy who were commanding destroyers over there. Any one of them, known or unknown to me, was good enough for me as a skipper. No man not ready to take a chance puts in for command of a destroyer over there; and no man not fit is given a command. But I took pa.s.sage with one that I had cruised with before--the alert, resourceful kind with plenty of nerve. If anything should happen, I knew he would be there with all his crew and his ship had.

What happened while with him and at the naval base I have tried to tell as separate incidents when I can, in the chapters which follow.

ONE THEY DIDN'T GET

We were one of a group of American destroyers convoying a fleet of inbound British merchant steamers.

The messenger handed a radio in to the bridge.

"We are being sh.e.l.led," said the radio; lat.i.tude and longitude followed, as did the name of the ship, _J. L. Luckenbach_. One of us knew her; an American ship of 6,000 tons or so.

Another radio came: "Sh.e.l.l burst in engine-room. Engineer crippled."

S O S signals were no rare thing in those waters, but even so they were never pa.s.sed up as lacking interest; the skipper waited for action.

Pretty soon it came, a signal from the senior officer of our group. The 352--let us give that as the number of our ship--was to proceed at once to the a.s.sistance of the _Luckenbach_.