The odyssey of a torpedoed tramp

Dear old Man,

Guess whom I met yesterday! I’ll give you a thousand guesses. Blangy! You have been asking yourself—as I have—what in the world had become of the old rascal, who had never given us a sign of life. I ran into him in the arcades and I started blackguarding him. He maintained that you and I were the loafers because we had leisure, whereas he had none. I soon saw that he hadn’t changed and was as lazy as ever about writing. As he had a free evening we took our apéritif together and he invited Fourgues to join us at dinner. Blangy isn’t afraid of him any more, now that he is in command of a trawler; indeed he treats Fourgues quite as an equal. During dinner he told all his adventures and there was material enough to fill a book. For six weeks he has been in command of a half-rotten trawler as big as a piano, with a gun as heavy as a pea-shooter, which wouldn’t be capable of going after even a crippled submarine. There are not a few like that, says Blangy, especially along the coasts of Africa and Tunis. Most of the time there is something that won’t go—rudder, tiller-rope, steering-gear, condenser, pistons, or boilers; one repairs as one can. For the rest, there are storms for which the submarines don’t care a hang, but which keep the poor old trawlers in port. So you can see just what our anti-submarine service amounts to.

Fortunately the papers say that in three months not one German U-boat will be left, we have sunk so many! Blangy is not of this opinion, nor Fourgues either, nor I. I can write you this, dear old bean, for I have a sort of an idea you think the same. We are not officials, we four! Blangy says I’m to send you greeting, and he laughed when I told him that on you, a navigating officer, they had played the same trick as on him, putting you behind a gun instead of on the bridge. He hopes that you will also get a trawler or anything else that will let you navigate. He is satisfied in spite of his misadventures on his rotten raft. He feels that he is living. His fever and rheumatism have left him, and he asks for nothing but the opportunity to rake a submarine, unless it’s the other way round!

Having bored you enough with Blangy, I will return to the adventures of the Pamir from Mudros as far as Algiers—that is to say, for the last month and a half. You may be surprised to have me write so soon and I’ll tell you why at once. We picked up at sea the crew of the cargo-boat Mer-Morte, of the same company as ourselves, which had been torpedoed the night before. In one of the boats was Villiers, engineer of the Mer-Morte, and the owner allowed Fourgues to keep him on board. That being the case, I passed half my work over to him—the engine, that is—and I have a little more time. I can write you more—at least, if it doesn’t bore you, in which case you have only to say so.

You remember that I wrote of the Pamir lying idle at Mudros with a cargo for a lot of different military units. The shipment had not yet reached its destination because we arrived in the midst of moving. Everyone was breaking camp—everywhere, Gallipoli or Asia. Some were returning to France, others going to Egypt, the majority bound for Salonica, for the army of the East, and no one to tell us what to do with our three thousand tons and our six cases of aeroplanes. Fourgues went to see the French Admiral, then the English Admiral, then the French Base Commandant, then the English Base Commandant, and all the authorities. Everybody said, “The Pamir? The Pamir? Three thousand tons? Munitions of war? Six aeroplanes? What to do with you? You are asking for orders?”

“What good does it do,” said Fourgues, “to have Admirals and Base Commandants in the countries where things are happening if they aren’t capable of acting on their own responsibility and must ask for orders from Paris for a poor little bark of three thousand tons?” Of course, the orders didn’t come. They have other fish to fry in Paris and London. We should still be there if one fine evening Fourgues hadn’t said at dinner:

“Get up steam, sonny, and we’ll start at dawn with to-morrow’s convoy. We’ll go to Salonica. They must be needing the stuff there, for it seems that the army of the East is going into Bulgaria. After the Pamir has left Mudros they can’t catch us because they haven’t given us any wireless and at Salonica we shall see what we shall see!”

He was as good as his word. The Pamir set out the next day, getting behind four big hookers that were leaving the barrage and nobody said a word. Fourgues was chuckling on the bridge.

“You see, the French Admiral thinks that I have orders from the military Base Commandant; the Commandant thinks that I have orders from the Admiral; between the two of them they would have let my cargo rot, whereas to-morrow General Sarrail will be dashed pleased to get it.”

Perhaps he was right. Perhaps, though, when they saw the Pamir put out, the Admiral and the Base Commandant were only too glad to be rid of the old grouser and said to themselves that they hoped he would go and hang himself somewhere else. Fourgues said that it would be a lesson to him, and that henceforth when the authorities had no orders to give him, he should give them to himself, because it was disgusting to let the shareholders make a thousand or fifteen hundred francs a day for doing nothing.

The Pamir got into Salonica the next morning after kicking around half the night in front of the harbour defences. None too soon the French Admirals have begun to put nets at the entrances of harbours, instead of leaving them as at the beginning of the war when the submarines had only to come in. I tell you, old man, the Germans discovered this before we ever thought of it, and the Austrians, too, in their North Sea, Adriatic, and Baltic ports; and they will discover many other things in which we shall be six months or a year behindhand. The thing that takes my breath away is that I chatted with not a few young sailors of your Navy and they all see it clearly. When I say young, I mean fellows between thirty and forty-five, the kind the English have already dubbed old fogies! In the French Navy these old fogies haven’t the right to an opinion, but nevertheless they see. It can’t be said that they are ignorant of their profession, having followed it for eighteen or twenty years; nor can it be said that they aren’t capable of commanding, because in England men of their age are already commanding a squadron or a Naval Base, and any day one can see an old French Naval lieutenant of forty-five with three stripes going to ask for orders of a young English Admiral of forty-two with three stars. The contrary never happens. Does that mean that the French are not as clever as the English? Tell me if you agree, or if, after your experience of the Navy, you think that the French Admirals are not anxious to rejuvenate the higher ranks? I should like to tell you now all I think about it and what Fourgues thinks too, but I see that my letter has not dealt fully yet with the adventures of the Pamir and so I must wait for another time.

It happened that our stuff was jolly welcome at Salonica. The Army people fell upon our necks as though we were their saviours. Guns, gun-carriages, picks and shovels, and everything else that the Pamir had—there was none too much of all this in Macedonia, it seems, especially as all ships are dealt with in the same haphazard way as we are. There are hundreds of thousands of tons to be moved from one point to another and nobody dares act on their own responsibility because all war-supplies come under the jurisdiction of G.H.Q. in France, and the Quartermaster-General isn’t here and doesn’t give any orders, but if anyone on the spot does give any he doesn’t like it and commands the exact opposite, and there’s no getting along with a system like that. So you can imagine how they admired Fourgues for having brought his three thousand tons without anyone having to ask for them. They unloaded us in a jiffy and the aeroplanes were especially welcome. No one knew where the devil they could have vanished to. The other six, which the Pamir left at Marseilles, had been sent in a hurry back to the French front, where there is so much breakage and where it seems aeroplanes are needed more urgently than in the Army of the East, which is only a side-show of the war. But the six we had hooked around—no one at Salonica appeared to know what had become of them, yet they were much needed, for the Fokkers and the Taubes came practically every day and there were none too many chaser-planes. That’s what ours were. We stayed at Salonica five days, and at the end of three those chaser-planes had already gone up and peppered the Bulgarians. This time Fourgues was satisfied and he said to me:

“See here, young feller, I begin to understand this war. There are two kinds of people: the Form-fillers, administrative species, who have the authority and who let the poilus be killed administratively and the boats sunk administratively. When the Forms have all been filled in and their responsibility well covered up, they rub their hands and don’t care a damn for anybody. And then there are the others: folks like you and me and some millions of poor devils. We drudge and wear out our skins without needing to fill up any Forms, but we are the ones that keep the business going and who will win the war. No one thanks us, but if France keeps her end up, it is because of us in the ships and the trenches. On land they haven’t yet managed to get heavy artillery like the Germans, so where the Boches send a shell of large calibre, we put a poilu and the blood of our poilus compensates for the inferiority of our artillery. At sea it’s the same thing, except that the submarine takes the place of the heavy artillery, and the ships which go to the bottom take the place of the poilus who get dished. All that isn’t good copy for the newspapers, but it’s the truth just the same. It will go on and on, but in the end we shall be obliged to do as the Germans do instead of scoffing at them.”

Fourgues is generally right, and the things he says come to pass six or eight months later, so when you tell him he is a pessimist, he has only to say, “Wait and see!” And when his predictions are realized, the people who said they never would be have forgotten what he told them in the first place, and they brag of how they had been predicting this for a long time! Then he gets into a rage and announces some more things which astonish them and they repeat that it can’t be so because the newspapers are saying quite the opposite. Five or six months later, behold Fourgues again in the right!

Have you noticed this, you on your Auvergne? Once in a while one has a true, honest, real tip—as, for example, when Fourgues or I tell things that we have seen with our eyes and heard with our ears on the Pamir in Archangel, or Norway, or England, or somewhere else. Not jokes, but things like “two and two make four” and “two hands have ten fingers.” Well, then, Fourgues and I spin our little yarns when we are asked to, as though it might interest people and as though they wanted to know the truth. God bless you, not a bit of it! The higher placed they are, the less they want to know the truth. When you have told them something they know is true, they answer, “Whatever you do, do not repeat this! We must not make the public anxious!” One would ask nothing better than to hold one’s tongue provided the people in high places do whatever is necessary to remedy the evils they say must be kept dark. But when you see that it’s not at all in order to put things right quietly, that they order you to hold your tongue, but only that they may sit with their arms folded doing nothing while those who are not informed imagine that everything is being done—well, old fellow, it’s pretty rank!

Or else these same official people don’t know that what you tell them is true—don’t know it officially, that is. So there’s no point trumpeting it into their ears. They listen to nothing, hear nothing, do nothing. Fourgues told at Mudros, at Salonica, and at other places the stories Flannigan told him in Trondhjem about the kind of submarine warfare the Germans were preparing for us. As he has an unholy memory for details, he repeated things from the German papers, with figures and all particulars. Well! All the Naval chiefs made fun of him as they did in the Fleet a year and a half ago. When he spoke of the Cressy, the Hogue, the Aboukir, the Lusitania, the Bouvet, the Ocean, the Gambetta, and all the others that have gone down, they answered that it was pure accident; that the Germans couldn’t do anything more because their submarines had been sunk—that all measures had been taken, that in less than six weeks the war at sea would be over, and that it was only necessary to read the papers! Whereupon Fourgues, somewhat astonished, pointed to the papers where the heading “Maritime News” is printed with one or two blank columns beneath. But when he assumes that these columns hide something, he is told that he is a coward and a panic-monger. Then he gets furious and holds his tongue for fear of saying too much. But he confides to me that with pudding-heads like that to look after things at sea, with those on the ships too old and those in the Ministries indifferent, we can expect anything of the Germans who won’t beat about the bush. He says it’s lucky for those who direct the English and French Naval affairs that the public understands nothing about it, otherwise they would get it in the neck in Parliament as the Army blokes did and we should be taking precautions instead of heading for catastrophes.

But I am wandering from the Pamir. When we had emptied out our stuff, the military authorities found it necessary to send a lot of colonials back to Algiers—Arabs and Soudanese who had been in the East almost a year and were dying with the cold. At Salonica there was none but the Pamir ready for the voyage—all the other boats were waiting to be unloaded. So we took on three hundred Africans. They didn’t give much trouble, poor devils, what with their shivering and seasickness. They asked only one thing—to be let alone. All we had to do was to give them bread and water twice a day. They swallowed a little and sicked it up the rest of the time.

From Salonica to Algiers we followed the secret route indicated by the French and English Admiralties. Fourgues took it, not for security, but for a joke.

“What will you bet, my boy?” he said when he had traced the track on his chart. “Will you make a bet with me?”

“I should like to, Skipper, but about what?”

“Well, look here! The Pamir is going to follow this highly secret route from Salonica to Algiers. Therefore, the Boches aren’t acquainted with it; therefore, it’s protected against submarines; therefore, we are required to follow it—isn’t that so?”

“But I don’t see——”

“What will you bet that before we get in the Pamir will either be torpedoed on this route—which we are ordered to follow—or that we pick up the lifeboats of some boat that has been torpedoed? Are you on?”

“Before making the bet, I want to know why. For, of course, it is not for nothing that we are sent out on a safe, secret, and protected course.”

Fourgues was fairly hugging himself. He wouldn’t explain, but he said:

“If I lose, I’ll stand you a box of cigars. If I win, you’ll take two middle watches for me.”

“I will, indeed, but why?”

“I’ll tell you afterwards.”

He wouldn’t give in and there was no explanation, but the old fox was right! Between Malta and Algiers we came upon the lifeboats of the Mer-Morte which had been torpedoed fifteen hours before.

We discovered them early, at about half-past six in the morning. I had the watch. Fourgues said to me when he knocked off at four:

“Don’t leave the secret route, eh, my boy? At exactly five o’clock turn to the west—you’ll see—at the point I have marked on the chart with a pencil. At that point the secret routes from north, south, east, and west cross each other. It’s a most interesting spot. All boats pass there. We’ll go that way.”

I made it just as close as I could. There was a nice little following breeze from the east rolling us about a bit, as we were in ballast. The Africans were vomiting desperately in the corners and we couldn’t see a hundred yards.

I had been going due west for almost an hour and a quarter and had just lit a cigarette to keep myself awake, when the lookout at the masthead shouted:

“Wreckage two points to starboard!”

I looked and could see nothing, but nevertheless I put the helm over and steered as the lookout had said, when he began to sing out again:

“More wreckage right ahead at three hundred yards!”

There was no need to call Fourgues. He leaped from his cabin to the bridge with his field-glasses and made out two lifeboats before you could wink.

“That’s all right, my boy! There are two boats, quite full. We’ll get them. I take the watch and you go aft to pick the poor fellows up. Have wine and coffee and blankets heated. They must have been there ever since last night and are probably soaked with a choppy sea like this.”

Fourgues handled the ship beautifully, and in five minutes we got the men aboard, although the two lifeboats had drifted five hundred yards apart. He put her to windward of them so well that they were in calm water, and as there were only sailors and not a lubber in the lot, they came up the ladder at once. They were drenched. I sent them to dry in the boiler-room, and after they had drunk their coffee and hot wine they slept the whole day and were as fresh as paint by night.

There was only one officer, the engineer Villiers of whom I have already spoken. We put him to bed at once in Muriac’s cabin and were a bit scared about him as he was delirious all the way to Algiers. A shell had burst in the engines of the Mer-Morte, smashing a cylinder and killing two men, and he doesn’t yet know how he ever came out of it. However, he got better a couple of days ago, and here is the story he told us:

The Mer-Morte left Toulon with a cargo of shells, gun cartridges, explosives, and all that sort of thing for the Army of the East. As usual, no wireless, no guns, nothing—just like ourselves. The Company won’t pay and the Navy thinks it a joke. She took the secret route from Toulon to Salonica, the same as the Pamir, only in the opposite direction. They were told that the route was guarded from one end to the other. “That story is all right for civilians!” said Villiers. “It would take at least a thousand boats to guard the route from Toulon to Salonica and there aren’t a hundred on the whole Mediterranean.” I ought to add that the Mer-Morte has been knocking about almost as much as the Pamir since the beginning of the war, particularly in the Mediterranean, and that Villiers thinks about things much the same as Fourgues and I, and says that his skipper, who went down with the ship, poor fellow, thought the same way, too. All the same it’s a joke that the people who do the real work of the sea think alike on the subject of the German submarine and say it isn’t a bluff, while the land-lubbers and the papers and the Ministers all tell us not to worry because it’s going to be over in two weeks. Which two weeks? Villiers thinks it’s a pretty bad joke, having just been through it, and although he is only an engineer and not a navigating officer, he said things which Fourgues considered quite true.

To return to Villiers’ story. The Mer-Morte, with her five thousand tons of projectiles and other munitions, followed the secret route to the spot where they were to head east for the Malta channel. She had not met a single patrol or guard. This was no surprise to Villiers, for he knows that patrolling is impossible. He asked us if the Pamir had met any patrols from Salonica to Algiers, and Fourgues drew down his lower eyelid: a good answer! That did not surprise Villiers either. He told us all this in port, and you know that when a fellow has just escaped death, has lost his skipper, his first officer, ten men, his ship, five thousand tons of shells and barely missed going with them, you really do listen to what he says a little more carefully than to the rot the land-lubbers talk.

So the Mer-Morte came that evening to the turning-point in the route. There, a submarine emerged five or six hundred yards behind her and fired a blank shot to stop her. The commander of the Mer-Morte was A1, copper-bottomed. As he had five thousand tons of munitions on board, he thought he must not let himself be sunk, because they were needed by the Army of the East; so he sent an order to Villiers in the engine-room to fire up for all he was worth and keep her at top speed for half an hour, when, as night was falling, he would be able to shed the submarine. Villiers did all he could and the Mer-Morte got up to eleven knots and a half. But the U-boat was faster than that and gained on the Mer-Morte and sent some shots into her. The Mer-Morte was no more armed than the Pamir and couldn’t reply. The skipper, seeing that he would be sunk, thought he would try to sink the submarine, so he came about and headed for it. You know what that was like—like an infantryman against a machine-gun. The submarine waited a little, then sent two shells on to the bridge, killing the skipper, his first officer and the others, and two more right into her hull near the water-line, which shattered the engine and boilers, and nearly killed Villiers.

So the Mer-Morte had to stop—no captain, no steam—a wreck. The submarine stood by and sent over an officer in a dinghy, who came aboard her. Villiers had gone on deck with all the crew who had not been killed. He was not yet delirious. The submarine officer knew French well and was very polite.

“You are to launch your lifeboats and put the crew into them. You, sir, will please accompany me to the bridge. Oh, we saw! We killed the commander and a watch-keeping officer. Our gunner is very good. But there’s something on the bridge that I must see.”

Villiers followed him. The officer was accompanied by two sailors armed with revolvers and the submarine stood close by with her gun trained on them. He went to the chart-house and looked at the chart of the Mediterranean, upon which the skipper of the Mer-Morte had traced the secret route from Toulon to Salonica. He compared this with a chart which he had brought with him from the submarine. When he saw that they matched, he said to Villiers:

“That’s all right. We know where all the boats go; our spies have not misinformed us. With secret routes like this we are sure of not losing time because you all go the same way. The patrol-boats are not very numerous, as you may have noticed; when there are any we stay out of range and come up again when they are gone. That simplifies our job.”

Villiers was astounded, but the other was very polite and smiled.

“Oh, it wasn’t by chance! Our boat was waiting for the Mer-Morte, which left Toulon the day before yesterday, at night-fall, with five thousand tons of munitions for the Army of the East. The same day the Saint-Artémise left with coal for Bizerta, the Jeanne-Marguerite with coal for Navarin, and the battleship Lyon for Malta. They all passed this way during the day. We saw them and let them go. We don’t work except when there’s no risk and when it’s worth while. Five thousand tons of munitions! We are very well informed, and then these secret routes make things so much more convenient!”

When he had finished carefully consulting the charts of the Mer-Morte, the Boche handed Villiers an account-book with counterfoils and asked him to sign it:

“It’s for our accounts and our part of the prize-money,” he said. “Of course, we should be believed if we said we had sunk a vessel, but it is better to have the signature of one of the officers. It’s more certain. In Germany, it’s not the same as it is with you. The more we destroy at sea, the more they pay us. We don’t make war for fun. So this little affair of the Mer-Morte, with her five thousand tons of munitions, is worth ten thousand marks to my commander, five thousand to me, and a thousand to each of the men of the crew of my boat. Nice, eh? Ah! I advise you to get into your lifeboats at once and row hard. I’m going to put bombs in the forward hold, and by gum, within a quarter of an hour there will be some first-class fireworks!”

Villiers said he supposed he would at least allow the crew to take some provisions and wine and clothing, as the lifeboats might be long at sea.

“What’s the use of that? We are not savages,” answered the Boche; “all the boats pass this way. There are some carrying nothing of importance passing within twenty-four hours—the Creuse, the City of Birmingham, the Pamir, the Santa Trinita. We shan’t do anything to them—there are others more interesting. We are well informed! Among those four there will surely be one to pick you up!”

Villiers got off in the lifeboat and they rowed as hard as they could against the wind. The Mer-Morte blew up twenty minutes later. He had time to embark all the fellows that had been killed and we buried them in Algiers. But he had held up as long as he could. Toward midnight the cold, the wet, thirst, and all that he had been through, made him delirious, and when we arrived he had to have a rope under his arms and be hoisted aboard—he had collapsed.

He is almost well now. We reached Algiers the day before yesterday and put ashore the Arabs of the Army of the East, who will tell this story in their huts. Fourgues and I are going with Villiers to-morrow to see the military authorities and leave a written report and make a verbal one of the affair of the Pamir and the Mer-Morte. I will write you later. The mail-boat for France leaves soon and we don’t know what the Pamir is going to do. Good-bye, old man. I hope Villiers is going to stay on the Pamir. Then I can write you more often.

Dear old Man,

You’ll never guess what the Pamir trundled up here? Firewood, just plain firewood! To be sure, there are lots of other things on top, but it’s mostly firewood. It appears that this commodity is scarce in France and every other country, and as in the Army of the East they had about as much as I have on the back of my hand, we brought two thousand tons. But I am anticipating. Let us return to Algiers where I left you after we had picked up the castaways of the Mer-Morte.

The authorities of the port received us coolly. Villiers, Fourgues, and I told our tale and handed in our written statements for the Admiralty. It was all as clear as daylight, but they looked rather black. They asked Villiers a lot of questions about the route, the ship’s movements, the hour when the submarine turned up, where the officer came on board, where the Mer-Morte went down—and Lord knows what else. Do you see it? Villiers was in the engine-room attending to his boilers and pistons. He answered that he didn’t know what took place during that time and that he had put in his written report all that he knew of the business. He said that he was the engineer and not a watch-keeping officer. But they didn’t like it. As I understood the thing, the Mer-Morte ought not to have been torpedoed just at that spot. No matter where else and nothing would have been said, but there—no!

I had an explanation of this the day after, knocking around on shore with a little midshipman in the cipher department, who had some inside information. He told me that the place where the Mer-Morte was sunk is just where the commands of two Admirals meet. So, you see, as there is some sort of a squabble between them, the patrol-boats of one don’t go into the sphere of action of the other, and vice versa. If a patrol-boat thinks there is something to chase and chases it into the other zone, both Admirals get after it and, so, of course, nobody goes outside his own zone any more. The Admirals have their boats where they can get at them and so good tramps are torpedoed.

Well, Fourgues, who isn’t an engineer, but who knows what navigation means, made an awful row. He said that with a system of secret routes which the Germans learn in twenty-four hours, we might just as well give up, and that if they were determined at any price to have a particular route for cargo boats, they should at least indicate a different one for each. As the submarines can’t be everywhere at once, all that’s necessary is to have the cargo boats widely scattered, for having only one route for all of them is the way to get the greatest number sunk. They told him to hold his tongue, saying that as this particular secret route had been discovered, the Naval authorities would find a new one, and as it was the best method ascertained by competent persons, there was nothing for him to do but conform.

Then Fourgues said that wireless could hurt no one, cost almost nothing to put in, and would at least permit those ships whose dynamos were not stopped by the first shot of shell or torpedo to call for help. They answered that all these questions were being considered, but it was not as simple as he seemed to think. After that, he asked to be given guns, one forward and one aft, so that if the Pamir were attacked by submarine we could do more than say our prayers and add Amen. That was when they fairly jumped on him. My word! For they retorted that if he didn’t wish to go to sea any more, he had only to say so; for they had other things to do besides putting guns on old tubs like the Pamir and that the authorities were giving these problems an attention which did not need to be solicited by captains of the Merchant Service.

I wish you could have seen Fourgues’ face while they were rubbing it in. He went from white to brick-red.

“It’s the same old story!” was what he said as we came out. “All the land-lubbers think we are afraid. As if I cared a blast about losing my life! But when the Pamir goes down, it will make three thousand tons the less. And not by putting blank spaces in the Maritime columns of newspapers can they rebuild those three thousand tons!”

As for me, I am beginning to believe that as far as the wireless and guns are concerned, Fourgues is more than right. But there has been no time to reflect on all this because the local press and the civil authorities have made the very devil’s own fuss over the affair of the Mer-Morte and the Pamir. Old man, I’ve had my biography in the papers of the town and you’d never believe what a wonderful chap I am. They interviewed me after Fourgues and Villiers, and hurrah for the heroism of our sailors, the mastery of the sea, German submarine bluff, and the efficacious protection exercised by the Allied Admiralties over our fleets! No doubt of it, when they want to knock the public, the Censor fairly lets the papers rip. Well, they invited all three of us to a municipal banquet. The chief Naval Officer came with an aide-de-camp, and all the swells were there. We were given the feed of our lives. When they came to the toasts, the Mayor, the Port-Captain, and the President of the Chamber of Commerce got off a lot of rubbish they had collected from morning papers. They know almost as much about the sea as I know about painting in oils.

But the one who took the bun was the Naval Brass Hat, who spoke one before last. During the afternoon he had blackguarded Fourgues as though he were a cabin-boy and refused to transmit any of the requests Fourgues made. The same evening when the champagne appeared, he fairly buttered him up.

“I drink,” he said, “to gallant Captain Fourgues, whose presence of mind and whose seamanship have once more proved to the Germans how vain are their alleged defeats inflicted on the Naval supremacy of the Allies! An accident is in no sense a defeat. I can state officially that precautions have been taken. Captain Fourgues will not again find a case like that of the Mer-Morte!”

I was struck dumb. Fourgues replied. You know that when he wants to he can speak better than I can spit. But I saw his beard was moving in a way peculiar to him, and he was creasing the tablecloth with his finger-nails. I wondered what on earth he was going to say to the crowd of them, but I needn’t have been anxious.

“Thank you,” he said. “I am a sailor, and do not speak well except on board my ship. Thank you!”

And then he sat down. Simply that and nothing more. Well, old man, there’s nothing in being able to make speeches, for they nearly brought the house down, the big bug made most noise of all. After this flourish the meeting broke up.

The inhabitants had prepared a vocal and instrumental concert with the assistance of local artists, and I lit a cigar while they made me repeat for the fiftieth time the adventure of the Pamir and the Mer-Morte. It seems the newspapers are not sufficient for the colonists in this country; however, one must be polite and I was doing my level best, all the time keeping my eye on Fourgues, who was talking in a corner with the aide-de-camp of the Naval Brass Hat who was tapping him on the shoulder as though he were telling him a good joke. But I could see that Fourgues was finding it anything but funny. He chewed the end of his cigar without having lit it and kept his hands in his pockets, which is a trick he has to keep himself from gesticulating too much when he is mad. When the aide-de-camp left him, he came straight over to me and said:

“Let’s get out of this, or I shall explode!”

I should have preferred to stay, because it’s really rather flattering to be treated like a hero; but Fourgues pulled me by the sleeve and we hooked it from the crowd of swells.

On the way back to the Pamir, he pondered a long time. He would stop and then go on again. I followed and said not a word. Finally he let it all out:

“Do you know what he told me, that gold-braided humbug? He said that as I had no confidence in the way the sea was patrolled and was afraid of submarines, they were going to load the Pamir with firewood for the Army of the East. In that way, he said, if a submarine rakes you or torpedoes you—which is improbable—you will float, my dear Fourgues—you will float—because wood is lighter than water. Because wood is lighter than water, because wood is——”

I believe Fourgues repeated it fifty-one times, his arms folded, and fairly snorting, he was so wild.

When we were on board, he offered me a glass of old brandy from his home to make up for the liqueurs he had made me miss, and a cigar, a Havana from salvage stock, which was not bad at all. And then he didn’t open his mouth again, but started trying to read his fortune cards to see if the Pamir would be sunk or not before the end of the year. All his attempts failed and he wasn’t satisfied at all. Finally he counted the cards and saw that one was missing, the nine of clubs, which he found in the card-box. So he chucked them all into the air and sent me to bed.

“Only, my boy,” he said, “as they are giving us two thousand cubic metres of wood to carry to keep us from sinking, do me the favour of pinching a few feet of it. We’ll make some rafts. If they won’t give me wireless or guns, that’s that. I can’t buy them in a bazaar, but if a submarine sends a torpedo amidships, I don’t intend that we shall all go to feed the crabs. Do you twig?”

I answered that I did, and went into our quarters where Villiers had just arrived from the spree ashore. He was a trifle mellow as everybody had insisted on drinking with him, but at bottom he’s a good fellow, for he is staying on board the Pamir and I shan’t have to bother with the engine any more. If he had wanted, the office would have given him some leave after the sinking of the Mer-Morte, but he said that when one had had an escape like that, there was nothing more to be afraid of and that he would be a mascot for the Pamir. The office paid all his losses promptly—which fairly astonished me—but didn’t increase his pay a cent.

Villiers has had more technical training than Muriac, who began at sixteen as a fireman on a coasting vessel and knew his engine as he knows his own pocket, without having a word of theory. Villiers went through the school of the Arts et Métiers and bores us stiff at meals with rot about Carnot’s law, the conservation of energy, and thermodynamics. Some days Fourgues looks askance at him, not liking to have people on the boat who know more than he, on no matter what subject. But he can’t say anything. Villiers, in spite of his somewhat affected manner, runs his show to perfection. He told me that he arrived just in time; otherwise the steam steering-gear, the condenser, and the boilers would have gone bust. I can well believe it. As long as the machinery keeps going, I am able to boss the job. But if it had begun to jib, I shouldn’t have known what the deuce to do.

At Algiers we loaded two thousand cubic metres of firewood. It is easy to stow—throw it in the hold and it settles itself. It isn’t dirty; you can be sure it won’t break. Fourgues himself found that on the whole it was as good as coal as a cargo. It was to warm the poilus of the Army of the East and we were ready to start, but at the last moment they told us to go and complete our cargo in France and ordered us to Cette. Fourgues tried to say that at Cette they’d probably have little for him to take and that the Pamir would lose eight days, during which the soldiers would be shivering with cold at Salonica. But as he was already on poorish terms with the Naval authorities, because of his talk of guns, wireless, and so on, they told him they had had enough of him and ordered him to go to Cette without giving any more trouble.

At Cette the fellows looked sick when they saw that we were more than three-quarters full. They shoved barrels of wine on top of our firewood. It took a day to level the logs of pine and elm. We were able to load two tiers in each hold, enough to keep the Army of the East drunk for three days only, and we got through without too much breakage—only three or four old casks which stove in while they were in the sling, and the crew fairly howled when they saw that good wine going overboard for the benefit of the fish! Just as we were on the point of sailing, there arrived from Cette a consignment of mules which had come from the Pyrenees for the soldiers in the East. They were to have embarked on a boat specially fitted for that sort of thing—only, the boat had been sunk two days before and there was a fearful fuss because General Sarrail was raising Cain to get mules. At the very moment we were weighing anchor, a fellow from the port ran back, signalling with his arms to us to stop. Fourgues had the ladder let down and the chap came on board and asked how many mules we could take. Old man, it was worth paying for to see Fourgues’ face.

“Mules, sir, mules! So the Pamir is a —— stable now, is she? I am full to bursting, sir! I have big logs and little logs and elm logs and other logs. And I have two hundred barrels of wine, which, at the rate at which things are moving, will be vinegar before I arrive. And I have strict orders to get under way for Salonica at four o’clock, sir, and now you want to know how many mules I can take! Oh, as many as you wish, sir! Put them on the deck—in the funnels—in the chain-locker—up the masts, and in my cabin, sir. Cut them in pieces and stow them in the hold and we will stick them together again at Salonica. It’s all the same to me! The sea is deep and we shan’t touch the bottom even if you load us with mules enough to founder us. We can pack your mules, sir, in tiers, two or three tiers; and if they can eat coal or firewood, perhaps they will still be recognizable as mules when they get to Salonica!”

I wish you could have seen the mug of the citizen with the mules! He would have crawled into the compass if that had been possible. He stammered excuses—urgent necessity, extremely urgent necessity, expected ship sunk, necessity of national defence, imperative order not to go ashore again until he had disposed of his mules on the Pamir.... When Fourgues saw that he had humbled him enough he suspended the order to get under way. Secretly he was enjoying it.

“Look here! I’ll take a hundred of your mules, sir; if you will bring enough hay for a week, for I’m not going to feed them on the bread of my crew. I will give them water from the boilers. That will cure those that are costive. But for G——’s sake get a move on! I don’t want to rot at Cette and I intend to sail to-morrow at five o’clock. But do your mules know how to swim, sir? Because, if the Pamir is torpedoed there’s no place for them in my two lifeboats. And if they are sick, I’ve no orderlies to hold basins for them!...”

The poor brute hooked it as soon as he could, and I am sure he is still wondering what strange monstrosity it was he stumbled upon. Villiers, who came up from the engine-room after Fourgues gave the order not to get under way, heard the last volley. But as soon as the muleteer had turned his back, Fourgues burst out laughing and gave each of us an Algerian cigar.

“That’s how we are on the Pamir, Villiers! Of course, I’ll take their mules, as many as there is room for on the deck. They are needed at Salonica. But all the same, they’re a bit thick—sending us that bird at the last moment! As for you, my boy, to-night you are going to have a wooden floor laid over the deck for all these quadrupeds. I don’t intend they shall break their legs on the steel deck. Have it ready by to-morrow morning at six.”

That’s the sort of man Fourgues is. He stayed up all night while the crew nailed those old planks that were left from our Moroccan Boches. At six o’clock everything was ready. We had made a fine floor with crossbeams underneath and with mangers along the railing. No one got any sleep. Villiers was all right. He calculated the length of the boards and crossbeams at once, the number of nails, the dimensions of the surface—everything. Without him we should have wasted stuff. If only we could have slept the next day! But the mules arrived with their hay at dawn and we went right on without stopping. Fourgues gave orders to serve wine ad lib., for, he said, with a little wine you can make a Frenchman climb to Heaven on a knotted rope.

Well, old man, in former times I have shipped horses, cattle, pigs, and asses on the Pamir, but I recommend mules if you want a little distraction. They have only four feet, but it seems as though they had twenty-five. When you put the girths around their bellies they begin to sniff and rear. When you start the winches and they are hoisted into the air, they are so astounded that they don’t say a word; they content themselves with relieving themselves because of the pressure on their bellies, but you can see by their sly expression and their panting breath that they are reserving themselves for later. And when they reach the deck and are out of the sling, they begin to dance, to run, and to let out a kick wherever they see a human face, and then it’s far from funny. We just missed having our eyes put out a hundred times, because there were a hundred mules. One jumped around so much that he went overboard. He knew how to swim and hooked it for the shore, and whatever may have been his adventures, the Pamir did not carry him along to Salonica.

The hay came too. Fourgues had it put on top of the deck-house near the funnel. It was as hard as wood and as dry as asbestos. We had to wet it before the mules could eat it. Two men from the crew were appointed to look after them, because there was no one provided at Cette to escort them. I am glad it was they and not me. For twenty-four hours they were unable to approach those mules who kept showing their heels and skipping like kids, so that the two reservists fled with the hay! But when the beasts began to get hungry, they all held out their noses for the hay when it came, and after a few days the movie-man and the croupier were chums with them. As none of the rest of the crew, Villiers and I included, could approach without seeing them wriggle their rumps, the movie-man and the croupier got swelled head and said that they were the only ones aboard who understood animals.

Fourgues, coming down from the bridge one night, wanted to approach them from starboard aft, whispering soft nothings to them in the language of Provence:

“There, there, my little dear, mon petit bichon——”

I should smile! Three of them sent their heels about two inches from his pipe and Fourgues hooked it faster than he would have thought possible. You can’t imagine the noise that a hundred mules can make on a steel deck, even with a wooden floor. There you have four hundred hoofs making the devil’s own rattle all night long, and there’s no way of going by-byes. Things went pretty well as far as Sardinia, because we had calm weather with a slight breeze; but from Malta to Matapan we ran into a wind from the North-West with a choppy swell in consequence. The hundred mules danced a hornpipe all together as we rolled and pitched, and their stamping drowned the noise of the wind. They brayed for all they were worth. The spray stung their eyes and got in their noses and they sneezed wretchedly. Add to this the two hundred barrels, loose in the hold, which went bim-boom! bim-boom! on top of the firewood and you see what a time we had from Cette to Salonica.

But it was all the same to me, for since Villiers has come I have nothing more to do with the engines. So I have six good hours a day in which to lounge in my cabin, playing the mandolin and reading your books. I have reached Suffren, Nelson, Villeneuve, and Trafalgar in the Naval History. Here is my conclusion: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The secret route was altered by the time the Pamir went from Cette to Salonica. Perhaps the sinking of the Mer-Morte was the cause of this. Fourgues and Villiers think so. All I know is that we didn’t have one patrol-boat between Cette and Point Cassandra. You who are on a warship—can you explain this to me? I suppose you protect the boats that are worth the trouble, although the Provence, which had more than a thousand men on board, caught it not long ago. Evidently boats loaded with mules, wine, and firewood are not worth the trouble, and I am the first to realize that this is true. I have had rafts made of the extra wood I pinched, and if the Pamir goes down we can hope to float. But I can quite understand that they shouldn’t bother about a tramp with a crew of only thirty-five men, and if you tell me that the others are guarded I’m satisfied.

At Salonica, Fourgues caught it, naturally. He was late with the wine, late with the firewood, late with the mules. It was some sort of Naval Captain, I’m not sure what, who came on board to tell us this. If you ever see him, he is a chap with a square jaw, big and strong as an oak, who doesn’t mince his words any more than Fourgues. So you can imagine what they said to each other. Fortunately Fourgues was able to show his papers quite in order and the other had to take it all back. They must be in crying need of wine, mules, and wood here, for they made us come alongside the principal quay of the Port Authority on the very evening of our arrival and we had unloaded all our cargo in three days. We were then sent to the outer harbour to wait for orders, and are now kicking our heels. It’s good for us, for we’ve all had about as much as we could stand, ever since Algiers.

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.