Chapter VI: Part THREE (2)

I must have slept twenty-four hours at one stretch after the unloading of the _Pamir_, and now Fourgues, Villiers, and I go on land about three or four o’clock and come back when all the lights are out. What a dirty hole Salonica is! There are two or three cafés, all crowded. In the streets the policing is done by Greeks, French, and English, and one is about as agreeable as the other. And there is an exchange of eighteen or twenty per cent., and Fourgues says it is shameful that the French Government permits French paper to lose a fifth when it’s exchanged into Greek. And then everybody says there is no use having an Army of the East if the French G.H.Q. refuses it supplies, troops, guns, aeroplanes, and everything. I could write volumes if I told what I have heard here about the fix they are in. I had rather be on the _Pamir_ than in General Sarrail’s shoes, and from what they say, he is pretty smart to have held on here against the Boches, the Austrians, the Bulgarians, and the Turks, without counting the Greeks at his back, and with such weak forces that if any general on the French front had been treated similarly he would have sworn by all the gods that his line was going to be pierced.

And in the meantime, old man, I am still a long way from La Rochelle, and I’m worried. It does no good for you to tell me that all is going well, that everything is moving, that it will soon be over--all that doesn’t help with my affairs. There you are on the _Auvergne_, well tied up snug in a harbour, and I think you are quite right to be there, for there is no use needlessly exposing battleships which cost eighty millions of francs and carry twelve hundred men. Not that your battleships are much good either--and I’ll tell you later what Fourgues thinks about that. At present there are only two things that count, according to my way of thinking--the Boche submarines and the merchant vessels which provision the Allies. All the rest is all my eye. Only, the Allied Admirals are neither on the German submarines nor on the merchant vessels. So they play to their heart’s content with code-telegrams while the ships that go sailing by are being torpedoed. But Fourgues’ cards say that the _Pamir_ won’t be torpedoed this year. As the war ought to be over before 1917, the rest doesn’t matter.

Good-bye, old man. Send me your photograph in sub-lieutenant’s uniform and don’t look haughty when it’s taken. We are putting at least as much into this on the _Pamir_ as on the _Auvergne_, where I send you a hearty handshake.

BILBAO,
_April 27, 1916_.

DEAR OLD MAN,

We are here to get iron. You know it’s good in this country, and we haven’t any left in France. But I will start again at Salonica where I left off.

They had no idea what to do with the _Pamir_ down there. We should be there yet if Fourgues had not annoyed all the big bugs of the Navy so that they told him at last to get out and go to Malta, on chance, where there might be something for us to do.

We left in ballast, nothing in the hold and a few passengers, young fellows from nineteen to twenty-five years of age who were leaving Salonica to finish their higher education in Spain, Switzerland, or Holland.

All these young people were very pro-French and Venizelist, and Fourgues was astonished at their going away from Salonica to study elsewhere than in France, especially as they said with tremendous gestures that the hour of Venizelos was about to strike and that he would at last espouse the cause of the great and generous nation which--who--of whom--and so on and so forth--and that they should form an army in Greece to fight at our side and that Greece would come into her own again.

Fourgues chatted with them in order to pump them and after a while he understood.

“You see,” he said, “these tender hearts are skipping out of Salonica because they are afraid they will be obliged to enlist if Venizelos organizes an army. They are, as we say, brave, but not rash! They don’t go into French territory because they think they might be called back, whereas in a neutral country they will be perfectly safe. I don’t know whether the ancient Greeks were as brave as the historians say, but those of to-day look to me like heroes, in the sense that they love to see others fighting.”

During the trip from Salonica to Malta we actually met some patrol-boats off the coast by Matapan; the rest of the time--search me! I wonder why there are people who ask what good it does for us to be at Salonica. Such idiots ought to go down there and see how, if we had no one there to keep Constantine’s mouth shut, Sophie’s husband would have handed his country over to the Boches long since and opened all his ports to their submarines.

And that would be a pretty business! Now that the submarines are already hard at it--no matter what people say or don’t say--you can see what it would be like if they could make use of the Greek ports and islands. There would no longer be any way of getting through down there; the route to Egypt and India would be cut and we should practically give the Boches all that side of the map.

At Malta we arrived in the nick of time, but as the English don’t like to have their ports too crowded, they told the French Mission to get the _Pamir_ out of the way at once. As no one knew what to do with us, they sent us to Bizerta where they said that perhaps we might find orders. We left after one night in port, still empty, but the public pays the bill. There was one woman-passenger who arrived with a Gladstone at the last minute and begged us to take her. She was the wife of a lieutenant in the Navy, and as he had been with his ship, she had not seen him since August, 1914. Talk about adventures. Just listen to this:

Ever since the beginning of the war the cruiser of the little lady’s husband had rolled around, to Syria, Egypt, in the Indian Ocean, and other places, and she had remained with her family in a village in the Jura where she suffered acute anxiety to think of her husband so far away. She is the daughter of a ship inspector, who knows as little of navigation as I do of theology; on a boat she is like a fish out of water. By every mail her husband wrote to her to wait, that his cruiser would come nearer to France some day, and then he would let her know. The first of March she received a telegram from Port Said: “Going Malta ten days repairs come immediately.”

She received this in her mountains one hour before the train left which connected with the express for Marseilles. Taking just time to pack a bag, she started and reached Marseilles the next day, believing that it was only necessary to arrive on the quay in order to take the first boat, as in the Jules Verne story. All day long she trotted from the Cannebière to the Government Docks, asking everybody, Customs officers, police, sailors, etc., where one took the boat for Malta. She understands nothing whatever about steamship companies, time-tables, etc. Finally her cabman saw that she was not making any progress, so he took her to Naval Headquarters. She says she can’t tell an admiral from a station-master because their uniforms are so much alike; so you can see how they must have laughed at Headquarters when she said that she wanted to see her husband at Malta. Simply that and nothing more. In short, they explained to her that the mail-boat had left the evening before, and there would not be another for a week, so that she could not reach Malta for ten or eleven days. The little lady was beside herself. A man, you or I, would have said, “To Hell with it!” But I believe that when a woman gets it into her head to see her husband she would go all the way on her elbows rather than give up. She took the train for Italy and went the whole way round, Nice, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Reggio, the Strait, Messina, and Syracuse--three days and a half without stopping and third class because she was afraid her money would give out. She herself does not remember how she was able to fix things so as to have the passports and that sort of thing. All she remembers is that she showed all the authorities her marriage certificate and her husband’s telegram. They tried everywhere to stop her. Then she would start explaining and crying and it would end by her being permitted to go on. Add to this that she can’t even say bread in Italian! She ate as she could, afraid to get out of the train in a station for fear it would go off and leave her. It made no difference, she stuck it out and she reached Syracuse. The mail-boat was not starting for two days and she hadn’t enough cash left to pay for the passage. At the French Consulate they sent her away because she was neither a pauper nor anything else, nor was she on Government service. They told her to write home for money as the telegraphic money orders no longer exist, and that writing would take a week or more.

Only a woman could get herself out of such a fix. On her beam-ends in Sicily without a cent, unable to get anything from her husband or from home, and nevertheless to arrive in Malta--it’s a mystery to you and me who are, nevertheless, old hands at travelling. She pawned her gold watch and a ring with a stone; then she found out in some way that there was a sailing-vessel carrying cork and sulphur which would sail for Malta the next day. By this means she made a day, as the mail-boat stops at all the ports and the wind-jammer went straight across without a stop.

I should like to know how she humbugged the old Sicilian skipper to take her. Anyway, she brought it off. Besides she’s pretty, the minx, although she’s only about as big as a pat of butter and she knows how to use her eyes. She thinks and talks of nothing but her husband, but in order to get to him she knows very well how to smile and jolly people along. She says that with the Sicilian skipper she had only to point to her heart and the word “Malta” in the telegram and that that finished him! Well, I should like to have seen it.

At Malta she took a row-boat in order to make a tour of the port. She had never seen her husband’s cruiser and all that she knew of it was that it had three funnels, two masts, and a ram. She was sure of this much from a poor snap-shot she carried. So she pointed out to the boatman all the ships with three funnels and he went up to them. As the names are painted out since the war, she asked everywhere, “Is this the cruiser _Bayard_?” Then someone would explain that the _Bayard_ was not at Malta; but she was afraid they were fooling her and kept on searching. Finally she was forced to see that the _Bayard_ was not there. She was told that it had left three days before, but that in time of war no one knew where a ship went and that only the Admiral could tell her--if he happened to be in a good humour that day; unfortunately he was more apt to be abusive. That didn’t matter; she asked where she might see the Admiral! They laughed in her face, and told her that this Admiral was a bachelor and nothing enraged him more than to have his officers see their wives, because he said that war is war and peace is peace. Finally she had the name of the Admiral’s ship. Well, I should like to have seen the collision between the lady and the Admiral!

All she will tell is that he asked her if she was clean off her head, and said that her husband had done very wrong to telegraph his whereabouts and that he was going to give strict orders that such a thing must not occur again; that there was nothing for her to do but make for France at once; that it was useless to chase her husband over the “vasty deep” when the war would perhaps be over before she had caught up with him.

Fortunately, on leaving the ship, broken-hearted, she found an officer at the gangway to whom she said: “And you, monsieur, will you not tell me where the _Bayard_ is?” The officer, whose job was to decode despatches, was a friend of her husband and did know. He took her quickly to his cabin in order that no one should hear them, and under seal of secrecy told her that the _Bayard_ was at Bizerta for repairs, that it would remain there eight or ten days and she could catch it if there was a boat. All the regular service has stopped. There is nothing now but military ships or ships that have been taken into Government service and which must not take passengers. On these she could not go except by fraud and with serious risk, if, indeed, anyone would take her. But she said that no one could shoot her for that, and if they dragged her husband into it just because she went to look for him, she would make him hand in his resignation after the war and that was all there was about it! She doesn’t lose her bearings, this little lady! She had never seen the young officer, the despatch translator, but she simply annexed him. She borrowed a hundred francs from him at once in the name of her husband, and then she told him to inform her immediately of any boat, no matter what, that was leaving for Tunis. But the officer was obdurate, for he said if the Admiral found it out, he would put him under arrest without hesitation. The little lady must have given him the glad eye, for he gave in. And then she told him that she would take up her quarters herself with her bag on a seat in the Customs office for the night, so that the lieutenant wouldn’t have to run to a hotel, and so that she would be ready to jump into the first boat he pointed out to her.

In spite of his protests she did as she said and established herself in the Customs house. The officers wanted to put her out, but she froze on to a seat with her bag, and as she didn’t look like a dangerous criminal, they left her there and she slept with her head against the wall. In the morning one of the sergeants went to get her some tea and toast and she made her toilet in the office of the Customs men, as though she were at home. Just at this moment the sub-lieutenant from the Admiral’s ship came to tell her that the _Pamir_, having arrived the evening before, was to sail at eight that morning for Bizerta, but that the skipper of the _Pamir_ was notorious for his disagreeable temper and that he would send her to the right-about. Much _she_ cared! Ten minutes afterwards, as we were weighing anchor, she climbed our ladder, which was still down, bounded on to the bridge as though she had never done anything else all her life, and went straight up to Fourgues, for all the world like Jeanne d’Arc before the Dauphin. Fourgues made a face, and while she got off her little speech, assumed the expression he wears before a head wind. That would have been enough to silence me, but she went on and on! She begged, she smiled, and finally, as Fourgues kept on saying nothing and examining her from top to toe--but I could see his hands fidgeting behind his back as they do when he is enjoying himself--she burst into sobs, sat down on her bag, patted her eyes with a handkerchief the size of a nut, and kept saying over and over:

“How unhappy I am! Oh, how unhappy I am!”

Well, Fourgues took off his cap, went over to her, put his hand under her chin like a kind papa, and said:

“So it’s true, little girl, all this stuff that you have been telling me? Well, you’re in luck--there’s an empty cabin! Go and wash your face! I don’t want that fortunate husband of yours to think you are ill!”

Old man, she fell on his neck and hugged him! Fourgues let her do it and returned the favour. And then, tapping her on the cheek:

“It’s all right, little woman! I have a daughter of your age, and I only hope she’ll do half as much when she is married. And now, go and make yourself pretty and you can tell us all about it at luncheon--twelve sharp.”

Well, old man, we had the most charming trip--lady’s weather, bright sunlight, and that little woman radiating happiness from her hair to her heels. Her little bag was a proper bag o’ mystery; out of it she pulled ribbons, bits of lace, and all sorts of fal-lals, and when she came out of Blangy’s cabin at noon, you would never have believed it was the same person who had arrived in the morning with her hair coming down, wearing a shabby dust-coat. How we laughed at table when she told us her misadventures! Fourgues could hardly contain himself for joy.

She stayed on the bridge all the afternoon and I explained everything to her--the compass, the charts, the signal lights, the handling of the ship, and whatnot. She couldn’t have understood a thing, but she smiled and nodded her head. If I had spoken Chinese to her, she would still have smiled, she was so happy. That night at dinner, Fourgues seized the occasion to give Villiers and me a sermon on love, in order to encourage us to marry soon. Can’t you just hear him? He went through the whole gamut. As far as I am concerned I didn’t need so much--I’m only waiting for the chance. But Villiers tried to have him on and interposed all sorts of objections. And then the little lady took a hand and laid him out in five secs., and Villiers ended by confessing himself beaten and begging her to find him someone who resembled her as closely as possible. And so we were happy and on the best of terms. She went to bed and slept a full fourteen hours. When the _Pamir_ reached Bizerta, about ten o’clock in the morning, she came out of her cabin as fresh as a rose, and by Jingo her sub-lieutenant of a husband must find her more agreeable at night than a cutting wind in his face in ugly weather! It happened that the _Pamir_ was sent to Sidi-Abdallah, right where the _Bayard_ was in dry-dock, and that we anchored close to land.

“There is your ship, little girl,” said Fourgues, “and your husband is on it. Greet him for me if you remember. And be assured nothing will happen to him. With a little wife like you he is under a lucky star!”

She trotted off without waiting for anything more--fairly dancing--just fluttering a good-bye with her finger-tips--except that she gave Fourgues another hug.

You must forgive me for having told you all this. But you see on the _Pamir_ we have so few distractions and it was worth more than all the worries in the ports and the mooching around at sea. No doubt about it, that little woman had nerve! If everybody had as much the war would last six months less.

We had no time to find out what happened to her, for the _Pamir_ was immediately packed off to Bilbao--still empty--which means that the Government will have paid the owners a voyage from Salonica to Bilbao for doing nothing. But that’s no business of ours, is it? We sail, we carry out orders--even when there aren’t any!

So we stopped at Sidi-Abdallah two days, just time enough to provision, and started for Bilbao, where the _Pamir_ was to get iron ore. The voyage seemed rather dismal to all of us after the passage from Malta, and we spent the time going over what she had told us. Fourgues says it is stupid to forbid officers and men to telegraph where they are going. If it’s because they are afraid of leaks in the telegraph offices, they have only to employ people who are above suspicion, mobilize them, and bind them to secrecy; whereas, especially on the foreign lines, they still keep many who come from no one knows where and among whom there are evidently spies. But the Naval authorities, instead of getting rid of those who are no manner of use and who may let things out, prefer to imprison sailors who get drunk because the sailors can’t move and can be punished if they make any objection. That was the first point. He then said that it was pretty tough that in the Navy no one gets regular leave such as they have in the Army, and that it’s a good way to make the sailors grumble. And then, what advantage is there in repairing boats at Bizerta, where there is practically nothing in the way of a plant and no spare parts, instead of sending them to Toulon? The route to Bizerta and to Toulon is almost the same coming from the East and there’s no saving of coal, while all the material for repairs and refitting must be sent to Bizerta, as well as coal and everything else necessitating the employment of a lot of boats which cost their weight in gold like the _Pamir_. He says all this means delays of loading at Toulon and unloading at Bizerta. Whereas, if the battleships and cruisers went to Toulon, everything would be right there and at the end of railroad and telegraph lines. What with one thing and another, this little establishment must have cost some hundreds of millions without a single battleship having gained a day, while not a little material coming to it will have been sunk by submarines.

Speaking of submarines, we wish you would tell us how long they are going to keep up that farce of having the big ships sail in broad daylight on routes which are supposed to be secret but which all the Germans know. That they should send the _Pamir_ and others of her class out to be sunk is comprehensible, because officially, of course, there is nothing to be feared from the submarine warfare; but battleships or cruisers which cost fifty and sixty millions with a thousand men on board--Fourgues thinks that’s a little too much. Here are his own words:

“It’s all very pretty,” he says, “to maintain that the German submarines are a joke. But it would be better to take common-sense precautions. I’m not a submarine officer, but I have seen several such officers, and they say that at night they can’t see anything through their periscopes and are obliged to navigate on the surface. Consequently they are much less dangerous at night. So there’s nothing to do but have the big war-vessels sail at night and hug the coast in the daytime, or better, anchor in port, especially in the Mediterranean, where there is no lack of coast or ports. The trips would take a little longer, but surely it’s worth it to save fifty millions of francs and a thousand men being sent to the bottom. It’s the same for the transporting of troops and material. To start with, I don’t understand why they make them start from Marseilles for Salonica, instead of from Taranto or Brindisi, the Italians being our Allies. That would make three or four days less on the water, that much less risk, and not a few millions saved. But if at any price they must go by sea, it’s a mystery to me why they don’t sail by day quite near the Italian, African, or Greek coasts. In the first place, there is less danger of being torpedoed, for the coasts are easier to patrol; and then, in case of torpedoing, there would frequently be time to beach the ship and she might be saved. The lifeboats would not be lost either. They would make the coast and the crews would be saved. It’s all childishly simple, but it would take the Devil himself to make the responsible people understand that war is not peace. When it is merely a matter of annoying one, the big bugs know well enough how to say that ‘war is war!’ but when it’s a matter of doing something, they prefer to cough up Forms and Forms and still more Forms! This submarine business is going to cost them dear. But, you know, my boys, when the ships begin to go down like ninepins, they’ll let up a yell and say that the Boches are pirates; that everything had been done that could be done, but no one knew they were as wicked as all that! Because the public and the Members of Parliament are in total ignorance, the big bugs will receive universal sympathy and will anoint themselves great men--while the boats keep on going down. After a year we’ll be in an unholy fix, to say nothing of the country having to tighten its belt because there will be no way of feeding it--steel and everything else short. The public will raise Cain, but as no one will really know how it came about and the Censor will keep on choking off all those like you and me who see what ought to be done, the submarines will clean us out completely.”

When he once starts in, Fourgues fairly lets rip. But Villiers thinks he is right and so do I, and sometimes we wonder if all these people haven’t gone balmy. Well, who lives will learn and we can die but once. If the _Pamir_ goes down and we go to Davy Jones’ locker, at least we know whose fault it is.

We reached Bilbao after a bit of a shaking, from crossing in ballast and because as we ran up the coast of Portugal, the weather was awful. I will pass over the beastly trouble Fourgues had finding out where and how to get his ore. It looks as though the representatives France has here pass their time playing bridge instead of looking after their business. They must have sent down fellows whose friends at court keep them well out of danger and who prefer to have a good time at a safe distance from the front, but who know as much about tramp-steamers and materials as I do about the organ. And you should see how attentive the Spaniards are to the Germans and to all the Germans do down here. Practically the Boche is boss! The Huns know everything, see everything that sails, and inform their ambassador at Madrid, who must direct at least fifty thousand Boches with a nod of his head. There are Hun spies everywhere, but we haven’t any anywhere. Good Lord, it’s lucky for us that Germany’s geographical position in relation to the sea is what it is--in a sort of blind alley! Only to see how she has succeeded in making fools of us at the sea, at arm’s length, as it were, one can be certain that if we were in her place and she in ours, we should have been cleaned out long since and shouldn’t be getting an ounce of merchandise from outside.

Almost everywhere, down here, there are wireless stations and spy stations on the coast to inform the Boche submarines. They have only to listen and then go straight for their object. Neither Fourgues nor anyone else on board can understand the talk about stores of oil which the Germans, according to French papers, are keeping in neutral countries. They say that the Boches have supply-bases in Greece, Spain and elsewhere, and that without these they could not work as they do. That’s all sheer humbug. Every time anyone looks for these bases they aren’t to be found--because there aren’t any. The Boches carry as much as fifteen or twenty days’ supply in their submarines. People told us that in Bilbao, as they did in Norway last year. Well, then, will you tell me where they would need to get more? From Zeebrugge to the Mediterranean doesn’t take twenty days, and in the Mediterranean they have Pola and Cattaro, the Bulgarian coast and Constantinople, Syria, the points of Tripoli which have been retaken by the Turks, and those parts of Morocco that we haven’t got. No matter what they do, they are never more than three or four days from a friendly base, so they don’t need to go to the neutrals. We are making fools of ourselves, accusing the neutrals of things of which they aren’t guilty and which can’t be proved, when there are so many frightfully obvious things that we don’t dare mention. All this would be a joke if it didn’t prolong the war, but it will end by costing us dear.

Well, this time the _Pamir_ doesn’t sail empty--she has three thousand tons of good ore which the Boches won’t get. We don’t know yet where we are going, but we shall hardly leave before a week, the loading is so slow.

And now, old man, shake hands! I hope we go to Bordeaux because at Bordeaux there’s a train for La Rochelle. Good-bye.