0^ o V •/ - - < Admiral Wilson OUR NAVY AT WORK The Yankee Fleet in French Waters as Seen By REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN Accredited Correspondent with the United States Navy; Member of La Societe Academique d'Histoire, France "WE'RE READY NOW!" ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS INDIANAPOLIS THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright 191 8 The Bobbs- Merrill Company V^l. >^ K3 PRESS or BRAUNWORTH a CO. BOOK MANUFACTURERS BROOKLYN, N. Y. DEC -9 1918 ©CU5084(>2 to Rear-Admiral H. B. Wilson, To the Members of his devoted Staff and To all the gallant officers and men of the U. S. Naval Forces Based on France, so largely through whose great bravery and unremitting hard work it has been possible to trans- port an army to Europe and maintain it there. PREFACE Whatever the faults of this book, there is in it no error, no misstatement and no omission justly chargeable to any lack of facilities on the part of the author, or to any restraint on the part of the officers and men by whom those facilities were supplied. Than that accorded me, nobody could have had a better opportunity for observing the wonderful work of our Navy along the French coast. The courtesy shown me began with the moment of my arrival at the town that serves as the head- quarters-port, and has not since ceased. In addition to personal kindnesses and verbal instructions, I was given a "blanket" set of credentials that were headed by the following letter : U. S. Naval Forces Operating in European Waters; U. S. S. , Flagship. , France ; 17th April, 1918. From : Commander U. S. Naval Forces in France. To: All Forces. Subject: Accredited Correspondent. 1. Mr. Reginald Wright Kauffman is visiting U. S. Naval Bases on the coast of France in the capacity of an accredited correspondent. The Com- mander U. S. Naval Forces in France desires that he be given every opportunity for acquiring information for publication. (Signed) J. Halligan, Jr., Chief of Staff. PREFACE That brief missive opened every door — or ought I to say "every porthole" ? It was sufficient to take me to sea in troopship-convoying destroyers and submarine-hunting converted-yachts and up in the air in observation-balloons and hydroaeroplanes. It, and the good will that preceded and followed it, secured me opportunities to live with, and work with, for months together, officers of every grade and men of every rating, and there was almost no re- striction put upon what I cared to report thereof. "The only thing that you may not write about,*' said Admiral Wilson, in a conversation elsewhere referred to, "are dates of sailing and the names of ships in active service. Don't hesitate to find fault if you feel so moved. The Navy has nothing to hide, and if there is anything wrong about it, we want it known." "If you write with discretion and ordinary com- mon sense," said the chief base-censor to me, "I shall have nothing to delete." Such words as these, and the scope of the facili- ties accorded, were not only welcome ; they were also surprising. I found that a journalist working with the Navy was in the position of a guest of a gentle- man in that gentleman's house. It will be seen, therefore, that all the faults of this book are mine alone. It is true that the chapters on the office-work, the destroyers and the "Suicide PREFACE Fleet" were written abroad and censored — or, rather, passed uncensored — over there. Much of the rest of the volume was, however, written after my return home; in that portion I have tried to con- form — and I am assured that I have succeeded — with the Navy's censorship-rules, a necessary and in almost every particular a reasonable body of pre- cept ; but it is possible that, although the entire text has since been "passed" by the departmental censor at Washington as free from any matter which might be dangerous in enemy-hands, I may have been lat- terly guilty of some purely technical slips that the Navy Department had not the time to correct, but that Commander Tisdale, the base-censor in France, would, in our personal interviews, have had oppor- tunity to call to my attention. It is for these, if they exist, that I beg indulgence. Of my gratitude to the American Naval Forces based on France, and of my admiration for them, this book is an Imperfect expression; so little has been written of them that three-quarters of America is ignorant of their work; and yet, but for them — and for the similar duties performed in lesser de- gree by their brothers convoying such of our troops as go to Europe by way of England — we could not, to-day, have or maintain an army on the western front. Another debt of thanks that I hasten to acknowledge is one for permission to rewrite and PREFACE republish some parts of this sketch that previously appeared in the London Spectator and other maga- zines — ^and in a syndicate of newspapers that I rep- resented during a part of the present war — a syndi- cate formed iDy the Philadelphia North American and from time to time including, in addition to that journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Post, the Chicago Herald, the Los Angeles Times, the New York World, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. R. W. K. Columbia, Pennsylvania. 3d October, 1918. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE PART ONE DICING WITH DEATH I Sailing With the Suicide Fleet .... 1 II The College Kids — and Their Shipmates . 17 III Perils of the Deep 41 part two ROMANCE ASHORE IV The Spider in His Web 59 V The Men Behind the Ships 69 VI Adventure by Wireless 80 PART THREE SCOTCHING THE SUBMARINE VII In the Name of the Lord I Will Destroy Them 94 VIII On Board a- Destroyer 106 IX The Truth About the Submarine .... 122 PART four TAKING CHANCES X Up in the Air 134 XI Two Hard Jobs 150 1 : The Observation-Balloons 2: Shut-Ins XII The Blow-Up Men and a Mend-Up Mother . 168 XIII Marines Ashore 182 XIV Base Hospital 203 PART FIVE ADMIRALS ALL XV Fire! 224 XVI The Pluckiest Man Alive 234 XVII The Soul of the Sailor 243 NoWy Mr. Wall of Wall St., he built himself a yacht, And he built that yacht for comfort and for speed; He didn't mean that it should go Beyond a hundred miles or so; He wanted something made for show, Where he could drink and feed. Then Uncle Satn'l went to war and hadn't any boats, Or not enough to guard the stormy green, And so he said to Mr. Wall: 'Til take your six-feet-over-all And set it out to get the call Upon the submarine.'* "A cruising- fighter? Never!" (The experts chorused that.) *^ She'll sink before she's half-way out to France;" But Sam cut out her bathtubs white, He painted her a perfect fright And loaded her zvith dynamite: Says he: 'Til take a chance." ''Good night!" said Wall of Wall St.; the experts said it, too; But Uncle Sam was sot and sibylline; His little plan, it zmrn't a josh, Wall's boat's as dry's a mackintosh; She fights, b'gum; what's more, b'gosh, She gits the submarine! — Easter-Eggs. OUR NAVY AT WORK PART ONE Dicing With Death CHAPTER I SAILING WITH THE SUICIDE FLEET THERE was a broad streak of moonlight splashed across a leaden sea, and, all around that vast ampitheatre, circular walls of ebony. Nothing but the gently rippling waves cut by a sin- gle road: the whole world seemed as it must have been when, before man, the light of the night first came upon the darkness that brooded over the face of the waters. Slowly a black shape lumbered into the illum- inated track, moving with the clumsiness of an ante- diluvian monster. A prow poked forward, a fun- nel followed : the whole hull of a merchant steamer was there. Then something else appeared — a mere stick dancing upright in the little waves with the monster between it and the moon. Appeared and disap- peared and appeared again. 1 2 OUR NAVY AT WORK The monster gave a frightened scream; the scream of a jangled bell. It tried to turn away and run; it was in mortal terror of that fragile stick among the waves. The stick danced with a glee de- moniac : it seemed to laugh at the monster. What followed, followed swifter than the telHng; it happened in exactly thirty seconds. A tiny boat — a boat not one-fifth the size of the terrified mon- ster; a boat grotesquely painted like a harlequin — pounced out of the darkness, blazed twice from fore and aft at the stick, twisted as a coin on edge twists when flicked by a human finger, jumped directly over the stick as the stick dove below the water; passed over the spot where the stick had been — and something glinted from the stem of the little boat, and, just as she raced clear, there came a detonation that shook the rescued monster as a rat is shaken by a terrier, and churned the silver sea into hissing suds. Bubbles came up. A thick scum of oil appeared where the demon stick had danced. But the stick did not come up again. "The United States Patrol Squadron Based on the Fleet in European Waters" — the Easter Egg Flotilla — the Suicide Club — had saved another cargo-ship and sunk another German submarine. That is one example, and one only, of the sort of work that has been done by one division of our Navy of which the American public has had little news : the originally christened "Mosquito Fleet Abroad," WITH THE SUICIDE FLEET 3 wherewith I early had the privilege of sailing. Every "gob" — that is to say, every sailor — knew this fleet and wondered at its work — and nobody else was, for a long time, permitted to know; yet there is not a pilot along the French coast but will tell you that, within six months after the arrival of the Mosquito Flotilla, the S. O. S. calls were re- duced by more than half. Where these sea-wasps operated, how their ex- plosives were composed and how discharged, when and by what means they received news of the sub- marines' movements — these are matters that, if published, might give aid to the enemy. But enough may be told to make clear the courageous work of a branch of the service that deserves as much pub- licity and praise as has been given to soldiers, tanks and aeroplanes. The job of the Suicide Club was to convoy trans- ports and supply-ships through the dangerous areas, and to chase that craft which makes its reputation by blows below the belt ; but, though they had a two- fold duty, they faced, constantly, dangers manifold. Yellow dirigibles might hover above them and their wards for a few miles of their course or all of it, hydroaeroplanes and tug-towed observation-balloons might lend the aid that regulations allowed: peril was unremitting; their orders were to hunt peril. Was a given field reported swept of mines? The "eggs" that a Boche mine-layer *'lays" can be placed deep in the seas and governed, by soluble caps, to 4 OUR NAVY AT WORK rise twenty- four hours later. Was this course or that known to be clear of submarines? Then it was in the other, the infested course, that the Suicide Club was most required. There is nothing heroic in their appearance ; there is everything grotesque. To obtain the lowest visi- bility, they are painted hysterically, as if by some futurist in eternity. Perhaps the largest is of seven hundred tons gross, measures one hundred and thirty feet on the water and draws but thirteen feet. Certainly most of them were once the swiftest and most seaworthy pleasure yachts in America, in W'hich refrigerating-plants have given place to am- munition-rooms and ladies' boudoirs to sleeping quarters of sooty men. It was to such a boat that I was invited, not one of the Poga-boats, otherwise known as "Spit-kids" — which is Navy for the happily obsolete cuspidor — but to quite the smallest vessel in which it has even been my fortune to sail the high seas — yet we car- ried, or crowded, seventy men. Moreover, in rough weather we had a roll of forty-seven degrees, and if you don't believe it, you should come aboard and watch the inclinometre. "Four-Stripes" (it is thus irreverently, but no less loyally, that the crew, with an eye to his insignia, speak of their Captain, just as they call a lieutenant- commander "Two-and-a-Half," and a junior lieu- tenant "Dot - and - Carry - One") — Four - Stripes showed all that was to be shown, from the "pills" WITH THE SUICIDE FLEET 5 with which the submerged submarine is treated — pills known by the initial letters of their component explosives — to the bridge, whereof I was given the freedom. He told me of torpedoed steamers' boats with dead men in them — not always dead from expo- sure; of many men in life-preservers picked up after almost incredible hours in the water; but he spoke only under compulsion of his own experiences, and he mentioned with a smile the reason for isolating some rescued sailors from his crew : ''They weren't very clean men," he explained. "They were covered with what our boys call shirt- squirrels." The chief quartermaster approached the navi- gator : 'Twelve o'clock, sir, and the chronometre is wound." He didn't say "the chronometre is round," as the traditional green man does. The announcement was repeated to the Captain. "Make it so," said he. "Sound eight bells," said the navigating officer to the chief quartermaster. One of the forecastle men came up to me: "Mess-gear set, sir. Will you take chow with us, sir?" I took it, and I have rarely eaten a better cooked meal, or a more enlightening one. We fed in a dark hole among updrawn canvas bunks ; when anything went wrong, it was "pardon me," and there was some discussion of the technical veracity of Kip- 6 OUR NAVY AT WORK ling's sea-verse; but the immediate vocabulary was entirely local. Can you, gentle reader, translate 'Tut a fair wind behind the lighthouse?" I can — now; it means "pass the salt-cellar." And, though you may understand ''spuds" and guess that "red lead" is catsup, which it hugely resembles, and that "shoestrings" are — or is — spaghetti, I venture to doubt that your perspicacity would divine that "slumgullion" is beef stew; "railroad hash," a mix- ture of "spuds" and large lumps of beef; "canned Bill," canned corned beef; "Mulligan," shredded Bill and onions, and that "fish-eyes" are tapioca pudding. You think that these men spun wild yarns of ad- venture for my credulous ears? They didn't; they are living adventure — what they talked about was coaling ship. "On a boat like this," said one of them, "every man's a 'swipe' " — by which he meant a coal-passer — "for we have to coal by hand. We do it each time we come into port. Passing coal! Some of us were more used to selling bonds, but we're all on to the job by now. We started in the first day aboard. The barges come up, one on each side, and on each side there are four men shovelling into the baskets, four men passing the baskets overhead to the deck — you have to heave them three feet above your head — two passing on deck and two dumping; twenty- four in all. We coaled from 7 :30 a. m. to lip. M. one hundred and seven tons, and we did it WITH THE SUICIDE FLBET 7 at an average rate of two hundred baskets in nine minutes, too. Get on to my eyes ; don't I look like a movie-idol ?'* I had noticed this before: at the lids* edge, at the lashes' roots, each man's eyes were delicately blacked as if by a makeup-pencil. It was the resid- ium of coal that none can remove. "When you're all in from passing coal, and black from hair to toenails, you quit and swab-up the decks ; Field-day, we call it, scrubbing-up ships and clothes ; 'piping down' ; I had some sympathy for the Dutchman before I got on this job, but after coaling ship for the first day, they'd got my an- gora; it was *Kill the kaiser' for me." Who are these boys? The strangest of mixtures. Most of them were bred to the sea, but though all are good sailors now, some, at the start, were ama- teur yachtsmen, and one or two didn't know, as they put it, "which the sharp end of the ship was." Eighty per cent, of our crew were old hands, but we had a Philadelphia policeman and a Texan ranger: our first boatswain's mate had his sheepskin from Cor- nell ; there was a Lehigh senior in the forecastle and a Harvard postgraduate assisting in the radio-room. "She has a good roll," I sputtered to one of the men on watch as I "went up topside," which is to say, as I clambered to the bridge. "Yes, sir," was that common seaman's answer. "She always had that reputation as a yacht. My parents told me so : they used to cruise in her." 8 OUR NAVY AT WORK A moment later, below me, a petty officer was shouting to a grimy gob : "Hey " (and the tars name was that of one of America's best-known yachtsmen) ; **that you with them dirty shoes muddying up this deck ? Go below an' take 'em off !" He turned to me : *'You see, the Black Gang — that's the stokers an' men that works around the ketdes, the engines, I mean — they comes up for a breath o' air in their 'steamin'-shoes,' the shoes they wear at work, an' they're all lousy with oil an' coal." "Bathing in a bucket !" I heard that yachtsman re- mark : "Two quarts of water twice a day ! I'll never get used to 5 :30 in the morning and cold water on my feet." But he laughed as he said it, and there wasn't a more able worker aboard. Another hand put it to me in this fashion : "So many days afloat, and so many in port, while another section of the fleet's at sea; that's the rule here, and when you're at sea with these boats, you're on the job every minute. It's 'Merry Christmas' get busy,' and 'Knock off work— -and carry pig-iron.' All the time, if there's nothing else to do, you can 'break out' — I mean you can get — a pot of red lead and paint a protecting coat of it over some of the ironwork. When we're in harbour, we have our Rope- Yarn Sunday, which is what we call our mid- week half -holiday; but, except for liberty-parties ashore, that's about our limit. Afloat, the limit of work is the limit of endurance ; but that's what we're The bridge of one of the suicide fleet .A-^m ^ * ^ " ! ' r WITH THE SUICIDE FLEET 9 here for, and even if we don't get any brass bands and cheering crowds in this service, we're not kick- ing/' "Rise and shine," "Show a leg," "Up all ham- mocks," "Heave out and lash to," "Grab a sock" — these are all Suicide Fleet slang for what the soldiers call reveille ; but reveille does not begin the mosquito- man's day, because the day of the Mosquito Flotilla is continuous. Once in the schedule's cycle, a man is in the "Admiral's Watch" — passing an entire night abed — but that luxury is inevitably balanced by the "Admiral's Watch with the Belly Out," which is the watch that runs from midnight until four. You are convoying merchantmen and transports, and these ply on forever; you are chasing subma- rines, and the submarine is always at his task ; there- fore, your work is endless, and endless the strain of it. In every weather, bridge and decks are lined with lookouts, day and night ; night and day the gun crews stand to their guns, and from sun to sun the stokers shovel and the "greasers" oil; and the long monotony is a monotony of which every slow mo- ment may well be your last. You are there to watch and rescue; there is none that will watch or rescue you. Scouring the horizon with aching eyes, while the sickening deck heaves under them, while the sun blisters or the icy rain cuts at their faces and eats through sou'wester, sheepskin- jacket and hip-boots — looking, looking, always looking — seated in the 10 OUR NAVY AT WORK close radio-room with the tumult of clashing calls pricking at eardrums and stabbing brain-centres — listening, listening, always listening — penned in the stinking sweat and heat of the clanging, crowded fire-room, where the air is so full of dust that it passes to the lungs in gulps and lumps — with strain- ing naked back tossing in coal — always feeding the never-surfeited fires, always knowing that, at the next toss, the ocean's top may descend and crush them under tons of water: these are the men of the Suicide Fleet. At sea, they never sleep with their clothes off, never work but with their life-preservers bulkily on. Lonely, determined, unpraised, unknown — and then a few days in an alien port, where the Y. M. C. A. was their first hope of social salvation; that registers their emotional experience. 'The minute they get ashore, their one object seems to be to buy everything in sight," an Association worker told me. "They all want to get rid of their 'bunker-plates' (the French five and ten centime pieces), and they're spoiling the town's children by tossing these coppers away. Many of them know the French language, which is complex ; none knows the French money, which is simplicity itself." One of them on our boat has let me read and make extracts from his diary — they have the lonely man's passion for keeping a journal. "You won't find anything in it," he said; but some things I found that, originally set down in utter unconsciousness of their dramatic values, seem to me to indicate bet- WITH THE SUICIDE FLEET 11 ter than anything any outsider could say the spirit of the service. I quote tliem now : "April 5th. — President Wilson issued a proclama- tion calling for volunteers for the army and navy. I guess I ought to go. . . . "May 5th. — Some of our fellows are quitting col- lege to go to the officers' training camps, but I feel as if it would be better to get in right away, even if I do have to go as an enlisted man. . . . "May 18th.— Biff, 'K' and I came from Phila- delphia to New York to enlist in the Mosquito Fleet, which is to convoy boats and chase subs. Biff was the only one to pass the physical exam., and after being rejected, I went back on the afternoon train. "June 25th. — I came here (New York) to have an operation so as to be eligible for service. . . ." Another date, at sea: "The engine-room force, with w^hich I am quartered amidships, is a very mot- ley crowd. What most of them lack in real tough- ness they try to make up in conversation : the really tough ones are the less objectionable, as is usually the case, but they're all made of the right stuff. We had 'abandon ship' drill to-day : I'm stationed on the bridge and in the last boat to go, so if we do get smashed, I'll be pretty sure to have a chance to see all that happens." Another : "Now I know what real fog-banks are. This morning, when I got up at 3 :30 to take the 4-8 watch, w^e couldn't see fifty feet ahead of us and were in a driving rain. I got into trouble right off 12 OUR NAVY AT WORK the bat. We had been ordered by the flagship to take 'dipsey' soundings every thirty minutes. At 4:15, I got ready to take one by the Lord Kelvin machine, with B — and G — helping. I let the lead go over the side and told B — to pay out the line easily. He promptly let go the handle, and the whole thing (400 fathoms) went overboard before we could check it. We were nearly an hour getting it in, and the wire nearly cut my hands to pieces. K sighted a German sub this p. m., which turned out to be a whale." Another: ''Yesterday Harold R , in the radio-room, intercepted an S. O. S. signal from some vessel that gave its name in code, and nothing more. As she didn't send her position, we couldn't do any- thing. This morning, we passed bits of wreckage and four empty life-preservers." Three entries follow : *'Some storm ! Wind about 100 miles an hour. Maybe she doesn't roll! Eating is surely a problem. The dishes will not stay on the table, and most of the time is spent dodging cups of coffee. It is an interesting game to divert food and drink down one's neck inside instead of out, and eternal vigilance is the price of a stomach- ful instead of a lapful. . . . "All but six of the crew have been sick. For three days we have had our meals standing up, hanging on by one hand to a stanchion or post and to a plate of sandwiches with the other. Tables and benches are useless. . . , WITH THE SUICIDE FLEET 13 "The attitude of the boys is peculiar. All through the stress and strain of the storm and the uncer- tainty of our weathering it, the talk was not about the storm, or even submarines, but about food.'* In port: "The came in to-day. They picked up seventeen survivors of a torpedoed ship and passed a small boat with four corpses in the bottom. . . . One of my friends is in trouble: he wrote home to his girl and home to his dad, and now comes a letter from his girl saying she got the letter meant for his dad, and what his dad will say, God only knows. That's one of the troubles with having to post your letters unsealed for censorship. If the censor's too tired, he may put them back in the wrong envelopes, and maybe he'll do it anyway just for a joke. "Another friend has dinner regularly on shore with a French family — two girls and mother. He can't speak a word of French, and they can only muster 'Good luck' when the wine is negotiated, and 'Good night' when adieus are said. The father and two brothers have been killed in the war, and these people are most grateful to all the Americans that are coming to help win it." Again : "Returning from liberty, there were too many in our whaleboat, so about eight or nine of the men manned the dory. Just past the chateau, a French tug ran the dory down and smashed it. Two of our men, Olkin and Babb, couldn't swim, but Casey got 'Oil Can' and Fass got Babb." ... 14 OUR NAVY AT WORK At sea again : "Nothing exciting to-day to lessen the monotonous strain of being constantly on the alert. One has to notice the smallest things in the water and report them immediately to the bridge, especially toward dark and dawn, when the subs are most active. Birds have a habit of clustering around a periscope, and sharks often follow Fritz, looking for grub, so everything one sees on the surface must be mentioned at once." The night of the day on which I read that diary was drawing to a close. We had seen into safety the "one-lunger" — the single-funneled — tramp, which was our particular care, and w^atched it limp to the haven where it would be. ("These days," said Four-Stripes, "they're putting every cripple in the ocean if it can go only on crutches.") Then we turned about and w^orked out of sight of land. Soon a faint gray-pink would flush the east, but now, even from the bridge on which I was standing, there was visible only the leaden sea, splashed by a broad streak of moonlight, against which, as w^e made our way toward it through the darkness, our forward spars and rigging swayed in silhouette. "Have we any chance of picking up a sub?" I wondered. Four-Stripes explained that it w^asn't so much a case of picking up as running down; when we heard of a submarine, we must race toward it, and when we sighted it, we must pounce upon the spot where it submerged. WITH THE SUICIDE FLEET 15 "But I believe they have orders to run at sight of us," he said. "You see, we're so small and so light- draft as to be a poor mark, and they don't like v/hat they call our S^asser boom-booms.' " There were unpublishable reasons why, just there and then, it was a little difficult to get distress calls. *'But there are three submarines operating somewhere near here," said Four-Stripes, ''and of course we ofhcers are just as anxious as the men to fill our bag with them." ''What's the call?" I asked, "the warning — that you get when one's reported?" "That's no secret and no code; the subs know it as well as we do : 'Alio, 'Alio, 'Alio — and then the location in plain figures." A speaking-tube beside him uttered a faint twit- ter. He bent to it. "That was the radio-room talking then," said Four-Stripes, as he raised his face to me. He pulled a signal lever; he issued quiet orders. Our tiny boat spun about in the water ; men darted silently out of hatches until the deck was alive with them, each at his prescribed position. The ship plunged upon a new tack; from prow to stern the water boiled beside us. "What was it," I ventured, "that the radio-room had to report?" "Three 'Alios and a location," said Four-Stripes. "We're racing for that location now." They coal us in Latin, they S7vab up in Greek, They're gun'ale-deep hook-learned, the guys! You can't understand half the language they speak, They've tortoise-shell specks on their eyes; But, once up against it, they surely make good, An' I'd hack the hull lot anyzvhere: In a squall or a scrap, he it well understood. Them kids out o' college is there! — College Kids. CHAPTER II THE COLLEGE KIDS AND THEIR SHIPMATES I HAVE said that the personnel of the Suicide Fleet was composed of all sorts of men. That is true, but to a great extent it was composed of men, young men or men above the draft age, who might easily have had a higher rank in one branch or other of the service. They might, for in- stance, have waited and gone to the officers' train- ing camps that were everywhere to open; instead, however, they enlisted as common seamen, and now they are so serving while hundreds of their friends are coming over with commissions in the Army. There is Vincent Astor, serving as ensign on what was once his own yacht. There is a lad from Ten- nessee, who, writing his first letter home and de- scribing the ocean to his inland family, said that it was "just the same color as Barlowe's Creek, but wider.'* There is young Farwell, now, if you please, deservedly a lieutenant-commander, once sent home from Annapolis because his sight was too poor, and then giving up a newly-acquired law-practise in or- der to take war-service on a patrol-ship. I know a promising architect, a Beaux Arts graduate, whom I discovered repainting the water-worn side of the vessel on which he was a member of the Black 17 18 OUR NAVY AT WORK Gang; and of a Harvard senior I have heard a vet- eran say: "See that stoop-shouldered fellow over there by the gun?— He can't be dragged more than twenty feet away from it. Well, he used to be the best mathematician in his college class. He wasn't aboard here a week before we saw that we'd never make a sailorman of him, not in a thousand years; but it took us less than the week to see that he did have in him the makings of a perfect pointer for the gun-crew. You know what it is to shoot at un- known range. Initial range, one, five, double O — fifteen hundred yards, you understand; scale five-six — deflection. Then you fire and make a correction, basing your work on your own speed and the sub's. Well, anyway, that fellow never has to make a cor- rection. He's a born pointer." One afternoon when we had just come Into har- bour, and when, all about us, were capering from my first cruise with the Suicide Club, our crazily- colored sisters of that Easter Egg patrol, the quar- termaster sauntered up and leaned beside me against the starboard rail. "We've got some college men aboard," he said. "Of course, they'd all had yachting experience when they answered the President's call for volunteers, but some our bred-to-the-servlce fellows were in- clined to laugh at until a little thing happened on the way over. Now when there's a hard thing to be done, we know the college kids can do it. THE COLLEGE KIDS 19 *Three days out of the port we were making, a fire started in our port coal-bunkers. Water causes such fires, you know; somebody'd left the hatches off, and there'd been a shower — away at the bottom of that pile, the coal was white hot and going strong, and we seventy-two hard hours from shore. We didn't dare put more water on the thing, but we got up the steam hose, and at least kept it from gaining for a day. *'I had the midnight to 4 a. m. watch on the bridge. I was there when, at 2 :30, the starboard bunker blew out, showing the fire had crossed the ship. We couldn't wait for steam that time; we played a good old water hose, but inside of an hour we had three explosions over on our port side — un- less we used desperate methods that whole part of the tub would go. The Captain waited as long as he dared, and then — ^just after breakfast — called for volunteers. It was no case for orders : what we had to have was men that would go right down into that furnace bulging with fatal gas — fellows that'd walk straight into those lungs of death and shovel away the top coal so as to uncover the burning core. That was the only way to save the ship. "Well, sir, the first fellows to volunteer were the college kids, and the Captain gave them the job. *They jumped into that hell in squads of four men and a petty officer for each bunker. And shovel ? You ought to 've seen them ! Each squad was to be down three minutes at a time, and the 20 OUR NAVY AT WORK men were gassed like miners. In the first three min- utes, squad followed squad, because eleven of the kids were overcome and carried out, one by one, on the backs of the others. The doctor stood on deck with the pulmotor and pumped them through; but a lot of them were caught out of their bunks trying to sneak back and fight the gas again. It was the toughest job I've ever seen at sea, but those boys did it; they conquered the fire and saved the ship. "Since then you don't hear much against the col- lege kids in the Suicide Flotilla.'* I looked at the quartermaster hard. Somehow, in spite of observable efforts, he had not talked pre- cisely like a man that got his first education at sea. "How long have you been in the Navy?" I asked. He shifted an uneasy foot, "Third enlistment," he answered. I shot a bow at a venture : "What's your college ?" "Princeton," he said. " 'Ninety- four," he added, and then, with an almost boyish blush : "But it was these kids I was talking about. Don't mention the fact that I'm a college man to anybody aboard. I don't want any one to think I'm putting on side." That quartermaster's little ship has had its full share of adventure. One morning, she picked up three small boats with fifty-nine men in them. One- half of these men were from a ship that had been tor- pedoed a day earlier. They got away and were res- cued by a passing steamer, and they had not been aboard it twelve hours before it also was torpedoed. THE COLLEGE KIDS 21 I asked our Four-Stripes about the treatment of rescued men — he had been telHng me of his rescue of some that had been seventy-two hours in their open boats, and how some of these, having been caught when in the shower-bath, were clad in just about nothing at all. "We get them into the drumroom and lay them there above the boilers," he told me, "generally with their teeth chattering like a ship with loose plates in a storm. Whenever we sight life-boats, the com- missary-vSteward starts supplies of soup and coffee. Clothes ? Well, my crew generally offers its clothes until those of the rescued men are dry, and, as the crew's clothes are the better, Fve known instances where the rescued men forgot to change back to their own slops before going ashore. The living men are an easy enough proposition, but it always seems tough to have to race past a boat full of dead men and not be able to stop and give them decent burial." Convoying, it seems, presents troubles peculiarly its own, especially in time of attack, when the flo- tilla's greatest difficulty is to prevent hitting a clumsy or frightened ward. "In our last brush," said the Captain, "we were convoying an American merchant- man, and she kept her wits about her. We were a bit astern of her at 3 a. m. when a submarine came up between us. Nine merchant skippers out of ten would have gone wrong, but this American swung his boat to starboard, and so we went to port and brought both our guns into play." 22 OUR NAVY AT WORK "And did you get the sub?" Four-Stripes smiled. "Perhaps," he answered. Once a submarine, driven from behind a ship bringing up the rear of a convoyed column, came up a trifle ahead and blew out the entire bow of her victim. To give warning and to call for help up to the last minute, the whistle cords of these boats are now made with a loop that may be instantly attached to a hook in the nearest wall. Thus this battered hulk's whistle was set to blowing at the moment of the explosion, and in only one minute and forty seconds, she went down, screeching like a gored le- viathan, imtil the inrushing waters strangled her. It was a sound that no hearer is likely soon to for- get, and that the rescued sixteen of the crew of double that number will be sure to remember for- ever. One time the Emmeltne, that armed yacht on which I was first a guest, had in its care a merchant- man with new engines that he could not slow down to the speed of the other boats in the ocean caravan. He puzzled our captain by his strange zigzagging, and between 3 and 3 :30 a. m. crossed our boat's bow at least four times. A dangerous channel was at hand. "If he keeps on, he'll go on the L~t — reefs," said Four-Stripes. "Send him blinkers." The winking-signal was given, but apparently the 1^.^. m Commander of a coast-patrol ship. An American type THE COLLEGE KIDS 23 merchantman couldn't read it. He piled up his thirty-one hundred tons of coal on that reef. The little guardian stood by, and the crew of twenty- nine was rescued. Often attacks from submarines are invited by sheer wrong-headedness on the part of the ward; and one instance of this sort that I know of was furnished, in the case, I regret to say, of an Amer- ican ship. With the descent of darkness she dis- played, to Four-Stripes* horror, a stern-light that could be seen for twenty miles. He signaled : **Dim that stern-light." She replied : "It's only what we always carry." Four-Stripes repeated his order. The convoyed ship tried to argue. "If you don't dim that stem-light," signaled Four- Stripes, "I'll blow it off you." That is the sort of man that is a captain in the Suicide Fleet. Is it any wonder that out of the first two hundred and fifty ships consigned to his care, he lost only three ? Such officers command more than their boati: they command the respect of their men, and their men's affection. I make this typical extract from a typical letter; it was not written by one of the "Col- lege Kids," but none of them could have shown a finer loyalty : ". . . . The Wanderer is a little old yacht. I think it is the oldest in the service. Captain Wil- 24 OUR NAVY AT WORK son. He is a regular and an Annapolis man. A lit- tle quiet absolutely unostentatious person, but the personification of energy. "He has done the most extraordinary things. He has been in every single mixup. He has seen lots of submarines. He has answered radio calls from all over. "He is an entire surprise to the French by his up- to-date methods of convoying ships into harbour in the fog. They had four days of fog at L in which he stationed ships with lights at each buoy so that the other ships could see the course at night and thereby saved the congestion of a hundred ships. Concerning which the French commander of the port told an American officer passing through that it had never been done before. "One time they were out in the English Channel and they got an SOS from a ship which sent out word it was being shelled by a submarine on the sur- face alongside. Captain Wilson, though six hours away when he picked up the call, framed a mes- sage in English saying American cruiser coming im- mediately, stand by your ship. The submarine sank at once and left the ship and the men who had taken to their boats returned, though the little Wanderer did not appear until the next day. "When one of the Naval Engineers was asked by Captain Wilson for a Depth Charge gun on the stern of the Wanderer, the engineer said, ^Fm afraid that your stern is not strong enough to stand THE COLLEGE KIDS 25 the shock of the discharge.' Captain Wilson said, 'If we blow off our stern, we'll bring the bow in, and then they'll give us a better ship.' "There are two German subs operating regularly around here. The boys call them 'Armen Archie' and Tenmarch Pete.' The Harry Luckenhack was sunk by one of them. Captain Wilson, regardless of all advice given for such torpedoing by night, which is to keep circling for fear of the submarine, regardless of any danger to himself, stopped his ship and saved practically all the men. He received a letter from the survivors written so soon after they were saved that the handwriting was still shaky." To my way of thinking, there is just as much to be said for the other men of the Suicide Fleet as there is for the ''College Kids." The latter have, no doubt, a popular appeal, but the former have a pic- turesqueness that is all their own. On duty, there is no choice between them, and, of course, no dis- tinction; here I have separated them only for your passing attention, and having done so, let me quote you, even at some length, from the writings of three representatives of the non-academic jacky-class. These men were writing accounts of their first few months at sea during the present war. It does not here concern us whom they were addressing; the only point is that, though I later received permission to make such use as I pleased of what they wrote, they did not write with any self-consciousness. It seems to me that the simple manner in which they 26 OUR NAVY AT WORK have told their stories is the best testimony to their worth and valor. The first writer is a young fellow that enlisted be- fore the war and began his active life in the Navy: "We left New York harbour, the fifth of June, pulled down to and coaled ship ; then we pulled to the Azore Islands, and there we coaled ship. From the Azore Islands we hit a heavy storm, which lajsted two days. We arrived at our French port on the 25th of June. "We lay there for two weeks, and then carried our first convoy out. On this first bit of convoy- work, we were rammed by the W . It knocked us all out of our bunks, bent in our bow, and, though we were for a time alarmed, we found that the damage was slight and we made port without help. "The second time we went out, we were about two days at sea and had picked up our convoy and were on the way in, when one of our fleet was torpedoed. She went down in four and a half minutes, and we picked up a hundred and sixty-three survivors. "I saw a guy coming down off the starboard bow, and I threw a rope to him. He was so weak that he couldn't hold to the rope. So I ran back to the fan- tail, and one boy tied a rope around me. Then I jumped off the fantail into the water. They threw me a rope, and I tied it on to the man, and we both were brought on board safely. . . . We came into port with our eurvivors. THE COLLEGE KIDS 27 "The third time we went out, we were three days at sea and picked up five ships, with the assistance of four torpedo-boats and three yachts. On the way in, a big transport was hit and a huge hole torn in her side, thirty feet by forty. *'We picked up ninety-three of her crew, who had jumped overboard." Seaman No. 2, used to be, I was told, a clerk in an inland city : " . . . . The best yachts in the country, they fixed up and sent right over. We came in the Vidette, with the first eight. She was Drexel Paul's uncle's yacht, and the crew were college kids, and some old- timers re-enlisted and a few fellows that went into the service because they hadn't anywhere else to go. There is a lot of rough stuff in the Navy, but when you get right down to the bunch, they're a pretty fine lot of fellows. **The trip across didn't amount to much; I don't know what to put in about it. No one knew where they were going. A great many were seasick and all that stuff. On the way over, just before we reached France, we heard of German raiders. We'd get all excited and chase up to see what it was, but it never came to anything. "One morning, I was going on watch, when I hap- pened to spy a black object on the horizon. We couldn't make out what it was. The Captain started over towards it. As we got nearer, it turned out to be a dead elephant. That's a fact. It was full of 28 OUR NAVY AT WORK holes. I don't know how it ever got out there, un- less some ship was sunk, bringing animals from Africa for a circus. "A little before we came into port, our convoy- passed an American tanker that was sinking, and the Sultaiia went back and picked up the survivors. Just as we were arriving, the smallest yacht of the lot broke down, the Christahel, and she was towed in. She was an old ship, and made in England ; no one thought that she would last, and there at the last minute she broke down. But she was repaired and is still doing fine. **That was about all until we arrived here. We landed in France on July 4th, with the American flag flying. We stayed in port two weeks. Just as soon as we sort of got over our tired feeling, we went right out on patrol-duty. The first time was the worst weather for five or six months. We did pa- trol-duty all the time at first. Believe me, it was hard work! You couldn't eat; you couldn't sleep; you couldn't do anything. After that, it was pretty nice weather. "Around the third or fourth time we did convoy duty, we had our first experience of a torpedo. We had a big Greek steamer right beside us, so we didn't see the sub. It came up right behind a fishing-boat. It fired a torpedo and submerged. Got the Greek steamer. Took her forty minutes to go down. We never saw the sub again; we went on and left a French aeroplane looking for it. . . ." THE COLLEGE KIDS 29 Finally, and at some length — for I think you will find him worth it— here is the story of a gunner's mate, second-class, who, eighteen months ago, was employed in a business-house in New York: "On March the 27th, having received information on good authority that war would be declared on or about April 2nd, I concluded to enter the naval service. With this object in mind, I visited the office of the Naval Reserve force, 26 Cortlandt St., New York City, and was interviewed by the recruiting officer. "After questioning me concerning my qualifica- tions, age, etc., it was thought that I was much over the age-limit, I being over forty-five years of age. Later, the lieutenant ascertained that it was possible to enlist me for coast-defense service in America, and endeavored to have me enlist as a yeoman, but I desired active service at sea instead of being a yeo- man on recruiting duty. After passing the physical examination, I was accepted as a seaman, first class, and enrolled in the fourth class division, Coast De- fense. A week or so later, after interview with Cap- tain Patton of the recruiting station, he advised me to study up various manuals and take an oral exam- ination for gunner's mate, third class, and appear before him the following week. "I appeared as requested and passed the examina- tion favorably, and received my notification to call at the Naval Reserve Office, Brooklyn Naval Yard for active duty. I called as directed, and, after sub- 30 OUR NAVY AT WORK mitting to another medical examination, was ushered into a room and received my sailor outfit, which I was ordered to put on. "I tried to explain that I had left my desk open with many important papers lying around and de- sired to return at once in order to straighten up my affairs. It took some time to convince the officer that it was absolutely necessary for me to remove my uniform and return to my office, but at last I received the consent. . . . "I was assigned to the Corsair, which used to be Mr. Morgan's yacht. After a long search, I found her in one of the numerous docks for which the Navy Yard is noted. I boarded her, and the sentry passed me over to the Bos'n, who showed me where my compartment was to be, likewise my bunk, I proceeded to make myself at home, and at five- thirty that p. M.^ I had my supper, the first meal aboard the ship. That night, I slept in my bunk, and, although it was quite small for me, I enjoyed a good night's rest. "The following morning at six-thirty, reveille sounded, and I commenced my duties. For several weeks, we were busily engaged in carrying aboard ammunition, supplies, etc. About June 11th, we were hauled over to the coal-docks and had our bunkers filled with coal. Then a wagon came along- side the dock with a large number of burlap bags. We filled the bags with coal, and soon the deck was almost impassable on account of the bags. THE COLLEGE KIDS 31 "On the morning of June 14th, at 3 :30 A. m., all hands were awakened in the most silent fashion by the chief boatswain's mate and ordered to take their station and prepare to go to sea. I hastily got into my clothes, went up on deck and found it to be a dark, misty morning, with a heavy fog overhanging, and the air cold and penetrating. "At four A. M. we pulled up anchor and silently moved out into the stream. By midday we were well out of sight of land. "Soon the fog lifted, and we could see several large cruisers, quite a number of armed yachts and several torpedo-boats in our vicinity. Later we were joined by the large transports, and we set off in three divisions, each division having a large cruiser, armed yachts and torpedo-boats as their escort. Our boat accompanied the first division and kept up with the fleet for several days, when we were ordered to fall back and join the second group. For five days we were practically alone at sea, somewhere between the first and second division. One morning just as it was getting daylight, we could see the top masts of the second division hovering into sight. Soon we joined up and were assigned to the special con- voy of the U. S. S. , the famous transport of the Marines. "From time to time we would get close to this and would receive the cheers from the Marines aboard her. We in turn cheered back, and thus the days passed until we were two days off the coast of 32 OUR NAVY AT WORK France. Then our division was attacked by sub- marines. "From what I have heard, two torpedoes were fired at the transport, one just passing her bow and the other her stern. The torpedo-boat C and ours followed the submarines' wake and the C , being the nearest, was seen to drop several depth- charges which destroyed at least one submarine, as the effects of the charge were visible by the oil and pieces of wreckage which came to the surface. Ap- parently there was no excitement aboard any of the ships. A vigilant vvatch was kept, but no more sub- marines were seen. "On June 27th, about four a. m., revolving light- houses along the coast of France were seen, and la- ter in the day, the coast itself became a reality. About 7 a. m., we poked out noses into some quaint old harbour and lay there for the day. That eve- ning we were given liberty, and for the first time in the experience of many of us, we were walking llie streets of a foreign port. "The transport went through a canal, and the troops disembarked amid the cheers of an excited populace. To the French people it was very evident that America had in reality commenced to be her ally, and they were actually in the war. "For hours and hours they were singing French and American songs, and soon the streets were thronged with American blue jackets and American soldiers in khaki. We had many amusing experi- O u <