Chapter TWO: Ship’s Company

However, we have not reached our destination yet; which is just as well, for at present we are fully occupied in assimilating our new surroundings. To tell the truth, some of us have a good deal to assimilate. There is young Boone Cruttenden, for instance.

Little more than a year ago he was preparing to settle down in his ancestral home in Kentucky, there to prop the declining years of an octogenarian parent, Colonel Harvey Cruttenden, known in far-back Confederate days as one of General Sam Wheeler’s hardest-riding disciples. But President Wilson had upset the plans of Boone Cruttenden for all time, by inviting him and certain others to step forward and help make the World Safe for Democracy. Boone was one of the first to accept the invitation.

Several strenuous months at a training-camp of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps followed, and in due course he found himself, with a gilded metal strip on either shoulder, communicating his slender knowledge of the art of war to drafted persons who possessed no knowledge of the subject at all—just as thousands of other young men of the right spirit were doing all over the country, and just as thousands of other young men of similar spirit had been doing for more than three years in another country three thousand miles away.

“It was something fierce at first,” he confided to Miss Frances Lane, a United States Army nurse, proceeding, in company with ninety-nine others, to a Base Hospital in France.

By rights Miss Lane and her companions should not have been taking chances on a transport at all. She should have been crossing the Atlantic in a stately white-painted hospital ship, with the Red Cross emblazoned on its sides, immune by all the laws of God and Man from hostile attack. But the Red Cross makes the Hun see red. Therefore it is found safer in these days to adjust life-jackets over the splints and bandages of wounded men and send them across the water, together with the indomitable sisterhood which tends them, protected by something that makes a more intelligible appeal to _Kultur_ than the mere symbol of Christianity.

“It was something fierce,” repeated Boone Cruttenden.

“Tell me!” commanded Miss Lane, with an air of authority which Boone found extremely attractive.

“Well, in the training-camps the main proposition was to make the boys understand what they were there for. They were full of enthusiasm, but very few of them had taken any interest in the early part of the war, and we were all a long way from Europe, anyhow. They were willing enough to fight, but naturally they wanted to know what they were fighting for. Even when we told them, they weren’t too wise. Two or three men of my company could neither read nor write; another man knew the name of his home town, but not the name of his State. The map of Europe was nothing in his young life. Then, lots of them thought we were going to fight the Yankees again, and whip them this time!”

Boone’s eyes flashed, and for a moment he forgot all about European complications. He was his father’s son all through. But a certain tensity in the atmosphere recalled him to realities.

“I guess you aren’t a Southerner?” he observed apologetically.

“Massachusetts,” replied Miss Lane coldly.

Boone Cruttenden offered a laboured expression of regret, and proceeded:

“Then they didn’t like saluting, or obeying orders on the jump. Neither did I, for that matter. It seemed undemocratic.”

“So it is,” affirmed Miss Lane sturdily.

“Well, I don’t know. We certainly made much quicker progress with our training once we had gotten the idea. Our instructors were very particular about it, too—both French and British. There was an English sergeant—well, the boys used to come running a hundred yards to see him salute an officer. I tell you, it tickled them to death, at first. Next thing, they were all trying to do it too.”

“What was it like?”

Boone rose from his seat upon the deck, stiffened his young muscles, and offered a very creditable reproduction of the epileptic salute of the British Guardsman.

“Like that,” he said.

“I’m not surprised they ran,” commented Miss Lane.

“Still,” continued Boone appreciatively, “that sergeant was a bird. At the start, we regarded him as a pure vaudeville act. He talked just like a stage Englishman, for one thing. For another, a German bullet had gone right through his face—in at one cheek and out at the other—and that didn’t help make a William Jennings Bryan of him. But William J. had nothing on him; neither had Will Rogers, for that matter. He would stand there in front of us and put over a line of stuff that made everybody weak with laughing—everybody, that is, except the fellow he was talking to. I shall never forget the first morning we held an Officers’ Instruction Class. There were about forty of us. Old man Duckett—that was his name; Sergeant Instructor Duckett—marched us around, and put us through our paces. We meant to show him something—we were a chesty bunch in those days—so we gave him what we imagined was a first-class West Point show. (Not that any of us had been at West Point.) When we had done enough, he lined us up, and said: ‘Well, gentlemen, I have run over your points, and before dismissin’ the parade I should like to say that I only wish the President of the United States was here to see you. If he _did_ catch sight of you, I know that his first words would be—”Thank Gawd, from the bottom of my heart, we’ve got a Navy!“’”

To Boone and Miss Lane now enter others. (This is a trial to which Master Boone is growing accustomed, for Miss Lane is quite the prettiest girl on the ship.) Among them we note one Jim Nichols, who, previous to America’s entry into the War, has worked upon the New Orleans Cotton Exchange “ever since he can remember.” There is also Major Powers, wearing the ribbon of the Spanish War medal. There are two Naval officers, crossing over to pursue submarines. Until they begin, Miss Lane makes a very pleasant substitute. And there is a British officer who walks with a limp—Captain Norton—returning from a spell of duty as Military Instructor in a Texas training-camp.

Miss Lane, with the instinct of a true hostess, turns to the stranger.

“We were talking about our rookies, Captain,” she announces. “How did they compare with your Kitchener’s Army?”

“Very much the same, Miss Lane, in the early days. Fish out of the water, all of them. We had all sorts—miners, shipbuilders, farm-hands, railway-men, newspaper-boys—and not one of them knew the smallest thing about soldiering. They knew pretty well everything else, I admit. The ranks were chock-full of experts—engineers, plumbers, electricians, glass-blowers, printers, musicians. I remember one of my men put himself down as an ‘egg-tester’—whatever that may be! An actor, perhaps. But hardly one of them knew his right foot from his left when it came to forming fours.”

“Same here,” said Major Powers. “My first consignment of drafted men was a mixture of mountaineers from Tennessee—moonshiners, most of them—and East-Side Jews from New York. (I wonder who the blue-eyed boy at Washington was who mixed ’em!) The moonshiners looked the hardest lot of cases you ever set eyes on: they hated discipline worse than poison; and an officer was about as popular with them as a skunk at a picnic. But they were as easy as pie: they were scared to death half the time, by—what do you think?”

“The water-wagon?” suggested a voice.

“No—of getting lost! They could have found their way blindfold over their own hills back home; but they had never lived on a street before, and those huge camps had them paralyzed. They said the huts were all exactly alike—which was true enough—and not one of them would stray fifty yards from his own for fear he would not find it again. Curious, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Almost exactly what happened with our Scottish Highlanders,” said Norton. “But they took quite kindly to city life in the end. Regular clubmen, in fact. What about your East-Siders?”

“They were a more difficult proposition,” said Powers. “In the first place, they didn’t want to fight at all, whereas the moonshiners did. In fact, the moonshiners didn’t care whom they fought, so long as they fought somebody. They were like the Irishman who asked: ‘Is this a private fight, or can anybody join in?’ But the East-Siders were different. Their discipline was right enough: in fact, the average East-Side rookie usually acted towards an officer as if he wanted to sell _him_ something. But they were city birds, born and bred. They were accustomed to behave well when a cop was in sight; but once around the corner you could not have trusted them with their own salary. They didn’t like country life, and they didn’t like the dark. They were never really happy away from a street with illuminated signs on it—and there aren’t many of those in Texas. If you put one of the bunch on sentry duty by himself in a lonely place, like as not he’d get so scared he’d go skating around the outskirts of the camp looking for cover. I once rounded up four of my sentries from different posts, all together in one pool-room. But discipline has them nicely fixed now. By the way, you heard the story of the Jew doughboy whose friends recommended him to take a Commission?”

“No. Tell me!” commanded Miss Lane.

“He refused, on the ground that it would be too difficult to collect. He said he might not be able to keep tally of all the Germans he killed: besides, his General might not believe him. Anyway, he preferred a straight salary! Tell us some more of your experiences, Captain.”

“They were much the same as yours,” said Norton. “The trouble with Kitchener’s Army was that practically every member of the rank-and-file enlisted under the firm belief that Kitchener would simply hand him a rifle and ammunition and pack him off right away to the Front—whatever that might be—to shoot the Kaiser. Their experiences during the first six months—chiefly a course of instruction in obedience and sobriety—was a bit of a jolt to them. But discipline told in the end. To-day I believe most of them would rather have a strict officer than an officer they could do what they liked with. Leniency usually means inefficiency; and inefficiency at the top of things usually means irregular meals and regular casualties for the men underneath!”

“What do you include under discipline, Captain?” enquired that upholder of personal liberty, Miss Lane, suspiciously.

“Little things, chiefly—things that don’t seem to matter much. Shaving, and tidiness—”

“What, in a trench?” asked several young officers. But Major Powers nodded his head approvingly.

“That is just what most of us ask who don’t know,” he said. “But I have seen enough service to have learned one thing, and that is that a dirty soldier is a bad soldier, all the world over. If a man is encouraged to neglect his personal appearance, he starts to neglect his work—gets careless with the cleaning of his rifle, and so forth. If a man takes no pride in his appearance, he takes no pride in his duty. The other way round, the best soldier is the soldier who keeps himself smart.”

“That is just what I think,” interpolated Miss Lane, virtuously. (She had succeeded during the Major’s homily in surreptitiously powdering her nose, and felt ready to take Florence Nightingale’s place at a moment’s notice.)

“We certainly found it so,” said Norton. “In fact, after a short experience of trench warfare we revived all the old peace-time stunts. The order was given that every man in the trenches was to be shaved by a certain hour each day. (Of course, if the Boche attacked in mass, the ceremony was liable to postponement.) In billets behind the line every one was expected to make himself as smart as possible—brush his uniform, shine his shoes, and so on. The band played for an hour every evening. Saluting and other little ceremonies like that were insisted on. These things all together had a tremendous effect. I don’t know why, but it was so. For one thing, it made life behind the lines more tolerable—more refreshing. In the line itself, it made officers more concise in giving their orders, and men more alert and intelligent in carrying them out. In fact, the greater the fuss a regiment made about its appearance—‘eye-wash,’ we called it—the better its work in the field.”

“Things worked out that way with us too, even in home training,” corroborated Powers.

“So I noticed. I was in four or five big camps, in different States, and I found that the rate of progress in training varied almost directly with the discipline.”

“Which camp did you like best?”

The British officer turned to Miss Lane, and shook his head. “No, you don’t, Miss Lane!” he replied. “I belong to the most tactless race in the world, but I know enough to keep out of trouble of that kind! I had a gorgeous time in _all_ of them.”

At this point a timely bugle blew for boat drill, and the harassed veteran stumped off.

Boat drill occurs at frequent intervals, and is still sufficient of a novelty to be regarded as an amusement.

By all, that is, except the _habitués_—the crew, the stewards, and that anæmic race of troglodytes which only emerges from the lower depths of the ship under the stress of great emergency—the army of dish-washers and potato-peelers. These fall in at their posts with the half-ashamed self-consciousness of big boys who have been compelled by an undiscriminating hostess to participate in children’s games. They grin sheepishly, shiver ostentatiously in the fresh breeze, and offer profane but amusing comments in an undertone to one another.

But few of the present passengers have ever been on board a ship before. Indeed, many of us never saw the ocean until last week. War and its appurtenances are for the present a game, full of interesting surprises and wonderful thrills. It is surprising, for instance, however good your appetite may have been in camp, to find how much more you can eat on board ship; and it is thrilling, if you happen to be a rustic beauty from a very small town in Central Iowa, to find yourself dancing the one-step, in a life-jacket, with a total stranger in uniform, upon an undulating deck to the music of a full military band.

So most of us have entered upon the business with all the misguided enthusiasm of the gentleman who once blacked himself all over to play “Othello.” Some of us sleep in our clothes; others carry all their valuables about their person; not a few donned patent life-saving contraptions before we cleared Sandy Hook. But no one appears the least nervous: there is a pleasurable excitement about everything. And we listen with intense respect to the blood-curdling reminiscences of the crew, particularly the stewards. All our cabin stewards have been torpedoed at least three times, and every single one of them was on board the _Lusitania_ when she was sunk. The survivors of the _Lusitania_ must be almost as numerous by this time as the original ship’s company of the _Mayflower_.