John Passos - 1919

Then he left her at the apartment she had with a girl friend and took the car back to the station. He settled down and smoked a cigar in the smoker of the daycoach. He felt pretty blue. Next day in New York he looked up a guy he knew and they went out and had a few drinks and found ’em some skirts and the day after that he was sitting on a bench in Union Square with a headache and not a red cent in his jeans. He found the stubs of the tickets to the show at the Belasco theatre he’d taken Janey to and put them carefully in the cigarbox with the other junk.

Next boat he shipped on was the North Star bound for St. Nazaire with a cargo listed as canned goods that everybody knew was shell caps, and bonuses for the crew on account of the danger of going through the zone. She was a crazy whaleback, had been an oreboat on the Great Lakes, leaked so they had to have the pumps going half the time, but Joe liked the bunch and the chow was darn good and old Cap’n Perry was as fine an old seadog as you’d like to see, had been living ashore for a couple of years down at Atlantic Highlands but had come back on account of the big money to try to make a pile for his daughter; she’d get the insurance anyway, Joe heard him tell the mate with a wheezy laugh. They had a smooth winter crossing, the wind behind them all the way right till they were in the Bay of Biscay. It was very cold and the sea was dead calm when they came in sight of the French coast, low and sandy at the mouth of the Loire.

They had the flag up and the ship’s name signal and Sparks was working overtime and they sure were nervous on account of mines until the French patrol boat came out and led the way through the winding channel into the river between the minefields.

When they saw the spires and the long rows of grey houses and the little clustered chimney pots of St. Nazaire in the smoky dusk the boys were going round slapping each other on the back and saying they sure would get cockeyed this night.

But what happened was that they anchored out in the stream and Cap’n Perry and the First Mate went ashore in the dingy and they didn’t dock till two days later on account of there being no room at the wharves. When they did get ashore to take a look at the mademosels and the vin rouge, they all had to show their seaman’s passports when they left the wharf to a redfaced man in a blue uniform trimmed with red who had a tremendous pair of pointed black moustaches. Blackie Flannagan had crouched down behind him and somebody was just going to give him a shove over his back when the Chief yelled at them from across the street, “For Chris’ sake, can’t you c — s see that’s a frog cop? You don’t want to get run in right on the wharf, do you?”

Joe and Flannagan got separated from the others and walked around to look the town over. The streets were paved with cobblestones and awful little and funny and the old women all wore tight white lace caps and everything looked kinder falling down. Even the dogs looked like frog dogs. They ended up in a place marked American Bar but it didn’t look like any bar they’d ever seen in the States. They bought a bottle of cognac for a starter. Flannagan said the town looked like Hoboken, but Joe said it looked kinder like Villefranche where he’d been when he was in the navy. American dollars went pretty far if you knew enough not to let ’em gyp you.

Another American came in to the dump and they got to talking and he said he’d been torpedoed on the Oswego right in the mouth of the Loire river. They gave him some of the cognac and he said how it had been, that Uboat had blowed the poor old Oswego clear outa the water and when smoke cleared away she’d split right in two and closed up like a jackknife. They had another bottle of cognac on that and then the feller took them to a house he said he knew and there they found some more of the bunch drinking beer and dancing around with the girls.

Joe was having a good time parleyvooing with one of the girls, he’d point to something and she’d tell him how to say it in French, when a fight started someway and the frog cops came and the bunch had to run for it. They all got back aboard ship ahead of the cops but they came and stood on the dock and jabbered for about a half an hour until old Cap’n Perry, who’d just gotten back from town in a horsecab, told ’em where to get off.

The trip back was slow but pretty good. They were only a week in Hampton Roads, loaded up with a cargo of steel ingots and explosives, and cleared for Cardiff. It was nervous work. The Cap’n took a northerly course and they got into a lot of fog. Then after a solid week of icy cold weather with a huge following sea they sighted Rockall. Joe was at the wheel. The green hand in the crowsnest yelled out, “Battleship ahead,” and old Cap’n Perry stood on the bridge laughing, looking at the rock through his binoculars.

Next morning they raised the Hebrides to the south. Cap’n Perry was just pointing out the Butt of Lewis to the mate when the lookout in the bow gave a scared hail. It was a submarine all right. You could see first the periscope trailing a white feather of foam, then the dripping conning tower. The submarine had hardly gotten to the surface when she started firing across the North Star ’s bows with a small gun that the squareheads manned while decks were still awash. Joe went running aft to run up the flag, although they had the flag painted amidships on either side of the boat. The engineroom bells jingled as Cap’n Perry threw her into full speed astern. The jerries stopped firing and four of them came on board in a collapsible punt. All hands had their life preservers on and some of the men were going below for their duffle when the fritz officer who came aboard shouted in English that they had five minutes to abandon the ship. Cap’n Perry handed over the ship’s papers, the boats were lowered like winking as the blocks were well oiled. Something made Joe run back up to the boat deck and cut the lashings on the liferafts with his jackknife, so he and Cap’n Perry and the ship’s cat were the last to leave the North Star. The jerries had planted bombs in the engine room and were rowing back to the submarine like the devil was after them. The Cap’n’s boat had hardly pushed off when the explosion lammed them a blow on the side of the head. The boat swamped and before they knew what had hit them they were swimming in the icy water among all kinds of planking and junk. Two of the boats were still afloat. The old North Star was sinking quietly with the flag flying and the signalflags blowing out prettily in the light breeze. They must have been half an hour or an hour in the water. After the ship had sunk they managed to get onto the liferafts and the mate’s boat and the Chief’s boat took them in tow. Cap’n Perry called the roll. There wasn’t a soul missing. The submarine had submerged and gone some time ago. The men in the boats started pulling towards shore. Till nightfall the strong tide was carrying them in fast towards the Pentland Firth. In the last dusk they could see the tall headlands of the Orkneys. But when the tide changed they couldn’t make headway against it. The men in the boats and the men in the rafts took turn and turn about at the oars but they couldn’t buck the terrible ebb. Somebody said the tide ran eight knots an hour in there. It was a pretty bad night. With the first dawn they caught sight of a scoutcruiser bearing down on them. Her searchlight glared suddenly in their faces making everything look black again. The Britishers took ’em on board and hustled them down into the engineroom to get warm. A redfaced steward came down with a bucket of steaming tea with rum in it and served it out with a ladle.

The scoutcruiser took ’em into Glasgow, pretty well shaken up by the chop of the Irish Sea, and they all stood around in the drizzle on the dock while Cap’n Perry went to find the American consul. Joe was getting numb in the feet standing still and tried to walk across to the iron gates opposite the wharf house to take a squint down the street, but an elderly man in a uniform poked a bayonet at his belly and he stopped. Joe went back to the crowd and told ’em how they were prisoners there like they were fritzes. Jez, it made ’em sore. Flannagan started telling about how the frogs had arrested him one time for getting into a fight with an orangeman in a bar in Marseilles and had been ready to shoot him because they said the Irish were all pro-German. Joe told about how the limeys had run him in Liverpool. They were all grousing about how the whole business was a lousy deal when Ben Tarbell the mate turned up with an old guy from the consulate and told ’em to come along.