# War's Dark Frame/The Submarine Zone

WAR'S DARK FRAME
CHAPTER I
THE SUBMARINE ZONE
CAN'T be a submarine—We're too far out!"
Keep quiet, it's all right!"
"Don't get excited!”
Exclamations came in men's voices, unnaturally suppressed. From the women arose one or two half choked cries. Feet hastened along the decks. Apprehensive but without panic we poured through the companionway. You admired the women in that moment, because they had an appearance of steeling themselves against dreadful inevitabilities. And the sea was sullen and unquiet.
Many of us, I think, foresay what we should find at the forward rail—a view of the crew with purposeful faces at emergency drill. Yet the necessity for that exercise, the wisdom of shocking us from our Sabbath somnolence by the raucous alarm of the ship's bell, reminded us how closely ​ we had approached the incredible spectacle of a civilisation in arms against itself. What would the next day bring? Or the next?
Abruptly we realised that war for the individual has the quality of a perpetual and tragic disaster. Later, in the cities of Europe, in the devastated districts, in the towns under bombardment, in the front line trenches, that truth was forced upon me. So I have remembered chiefly the human incidents and impressions that will have a real meaning for the individual, who has had the foresight to visualise himself, his family, and his friends entangled in the struggle.
For it isn't easy to understand war in America. The entrance to the pier in New York teaches you that. Beyond comes a mental alteration as pronounced as the change from brilliant sunshine to the sombrc obscurity of the shed. It is accented by the tight line before the gangway, by the suspicious examination of passports and luggage, by the unstudied talk among the inspectors of bombs, of spies, of the possibility of submarines. And the gangway is the threshold of war.
On all boats bound for Europe these days there is an atmosphere of difficult partings, a reluctance to discuss the future. There are, moreover, people who bring war home to you.
That afternoon of the drill, for instance, I ​ watched a boy, not twenty yet, reassure two women who counted the hours before we would be off the Irish coast. All along he had interested us in a sorrowful fashion, because he had been wounded in the head at Ypres, and a disability had remained which made him of no more value in battle to his country. Always he seemed older than the old men, as if he could never forget and be young again. A tall, straight, ruddy-faced man, nearly at middle age, joined him. The newcomer, following his custom, wore no hat. We gathered around him, because, since he was on his way to the front from Canada, whatever he said seemed to possess a special eloquence.
"Funny time for fire drill! Splendid nerve tonic though. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if the Huns took a shot at us. It's about due."
"I want to die with my boots off and without fame," a man said plaintively.
We laughed, returning to our cards, our reading, or our naps. The boy who had fought at Ypres demanded a game of deck tennis. He had no difficulty finding three other players, for the growing tenseness was unfriendly to reserve. Already every one knew every one else.
​ "They say this boat's loaded so heavily—"
“I bid a heart. We all know she's got a big freight manifest, Mr. —"
"Think she has! Go down like a shot! I've been talking to one of the officers. Says there's no way to avoid floating mines. No respecters of neutrals. You've heard of the —"
He listed half a dozen boats recently injured or sunk by mines. The player who had spoken before grew impatient.
"Your lead to a heart."
The elderly Southerner turned away, muttering with a prideful air.
"Just the same, since I got on this boat I've never ceased thanking God I'm a powerful swimmer—a right powerful swimmer, sir."
The incident was funny, because nobody laughed. We glanced at each other and took up the game.
But, perhaps, the one who brought war closest was a pretty American girl, bound for Eng- land with her mother. We understood she was married to a Scotch officer, We wondered why she had been in America, and where her husband was, for she didn't wear mourning.
"The girl has a story, one woman after another commented.
To realise it you had only to look at her eyes ​ and at the convalescent pallor of her face, as striking as that of the boy wounded at Ypres. She wanted, moreover, to talk about her experience. That, too, was in her eyes. Because of the past, possibly because of something she approached, she desired to tell her story.
The last evening as we crept up the channel she yielded to the growing tenseness that fought reserve. She sat with her mother on deck, staring at the boats which had been swung out, listening to talk of the extra life belts that had been distributed—mere italics for possibilities of which the women were, patently, trying not to think.
The sun sank behind a low brown mass on the horizon—the coast of Ireland. We reviewed the crimes and the tragedies it had witnessed since the commencement of the war. We fancied the round backs of indifferent submarines, and black specks of humanity struggling in the yellowish, menacing water. A multitude of fishing trawlers pitched and reeled drunkenly. It was difficult to realise that their only game was submersibles, their only task the protection of such craft as ours.
Groups of people still lined the rails, scanning the dusky water. All afternoon they had seen periscopes. Each piece of driftwood in the forbidden zone had attained an importance never dreamed of in the scheme of things. ​ The moon appeared and quiet men cursed it.
They get us against it and we're gone," one and another commented.
The prow parted the transformed water almost reluctantly. It was as if the elderly Southerner had impressed on the boat itself his aphorism concerning floating mines.
As we went on, feeling our way, with a sense of dodging unseen and treacherous obstacles, the pretty girl told her story—a brutal one that brought the war closer.
The first chapter was just a year old—her marriage in Nice to an invalided officer of a Highland regiment. Before his complete recovery he had been unexpectedly recalled to active service. The uncertainties of waiting had appalled them. Therefore they had shocked this watchful mother lounging in her steamer chair. In spite of her panic they had married hurriedly. Their honeymoon had been the swift journey to the base at Rouen. Her voice was fearful rather than reminiscent as she spoke about it.
“He left me at a queer hotel on the main street while he went to report. He didn't know exactly what his orders would be—whether he would stay at Rouen for a while, or whether they would hurry him to the trenches with new troops. The ​ room they gave me had six doors and none of them possessed a key. It may sound silly, but it was late, and I was afraid, afraid of everything. I wasn't sure he would come back at all, and if he didn't I knew I might never see him again. Strange sounds drifted from the dark street. I heard soldiers marching; queer songs in French and English; far off, a bugle. I was lonely, and homesick, and unhappy. I knew he wouldn't come back, and all those doors frightened me. I tried to barricade them, but I couldn't find enough chairs. Then he ran in, and he laughed at my barricade which he had had to tumble over. He had to go that night, and I walked through the dark streets with him, although he said I'd better not, because it would only make it harder for both of us. But I went, and at the military station there were soldiers everywhere, and confusion, and a train—that waited. I didn't dare look at it, but I knew when it started, for he said goodbye—
"I looked then and saw him climb into a carriage filled with soldiers. He waved his hand, shouting to an officer he knew to sec that I got back to the hotel and later to Paris where my mother would be waiting."
​ "Instead of that she dragged me to Rouen. You need another wrap, my dear."
The girl shook her head.
"So I went back," she continued, “crying through the dark streets with that strange officer. Half way I stopped, remembering. I didn't have a cent. My husband hadn't given me any money. You see we had been married such a little while. We hadn't learned to think of such things."
She spoke of her interminable days of waiting in Rouen. She had been on the point of winning for her husband a staff appointment with its lighter dangers, when the word, hourly expected, had been delivered to her.
"Oh, quite brutally," she said. "I didn't know what it meant, death or a wound. I only knew I must go, so I persuaded a high officer to give me a pass for a military train. I spent a lifetime on that train. During many hours it crawled only a little ways. Finally they told me to get out. They drove me to a small hospital back of the lines. The odour of it And he lay there, a sister bending over him. She said I mustn't cry, and it was hard, because he didn't know me, because he seemed like one already dead."
Her voice dwindled, the mother stirred, then, as if to spare the girl, explained how she had drawn her husband from the black valley through ​ months of nursing in France and England. She had broken down. The doctors had ordered her to America, away from the hospital odour and the perpetual reminders of war.
She's going back too soon," her mother said.
"Naturally," the girl answered," because he writes he is on light duty again, and he's trying to persuade them he's fit to return to the trenches. I won't have it. I couldn't stand that suspense again. But of course they won't let him. He has a piece of shrapnel shell within an inch of his heart. He's done his bit.
"You know," she went on," I'll have to harden myself. I've grown soft in America, because it's so far from the war. You can't remain sane unless you are hard in the presence of this war."
Reviewing her story, questioning its final word, you realised how true that was. You shrank from the water flashing by, because you knew it measured your approach towards those fantastic occurrences against which men and women must harden their hearts or suffer beyond reason.
Not unnaturally I thought that was all I was ever to know of the young wife's history, yet the next day there was to be a sequel, read at first band, cheerless and unexpected.
We sat until late that last night. She spoke from time to time of the approaching meeting. ​ "He's sure to be at Liverpool. Suppose anything should happen to this boat?"
But for the most part she was silent.
"We will spend the night on deck," her mother said," in case anything happens."
In the smoke-room I heard men talking of sleeping on the lounges there. An elderly and morose commercial traveller heightened their misgivings with stories of his escape from the torpedoed Arabic.
“She went down in ten minutes. Five minutes would see the last of this boat she's loaded. If you were caught below decks—Good Night! Talk about rats in a trap!"
"Oh, forget it!" a man said under his breath. "I've heard that old fool sink the Arabic a dozen times in the last half hour. Once is enough for any boat."
But the morose traveller had been to the women with his premonitions. They wandered restlessly, or stared across the cold and troubled water, rehearsing his warnings. This one man had sewn the seeds of panic. The women didn't want to go to bed. Then a squad of sailors came by with hose, pails, and swabs.
They went to work with quiet confidence. One of them spoke good-naturedly.
“Better be off to bed, lydies. If you don't ​ you'll get wetter than though a tarpedo struck us in the bloomin' witals."
Some of them laughed then. At least there was nothing else to do, so they went. And in the morning the women weren't alone in surrendering signs of a sleepless night spent in bed fully clothed. A vast relief shone in the eyes of the young wife and her mother. Only a few hours away the convalescent waited to welcome them back to England.
To most of the passengers, indeed, the brown mass of Holyhead, rising to starboard, appeared a beacon of safety. A deck steward, who had grown communicative, grinned.
"Just as well they think that way," he said.
Without thought for my own feelings, he assured me that the really dangerous part of the trip lay just ahead.
Yet without adventure we raised above the sands the gigantic skeleton of the Birkenhead tower, and swung in across the bar of the Mersey.
Liverpool's suburbs stretched their uninteresting rows as a foreground for the routine activity of a war-time seaport. Remembered steamships lay in the docks or at anchor, painted a dead grey, converted into transports or auxiliaries. One of the best known of all wore a livery of white and ​ green with red crosses here and there. Bandaged men stared dumbly at us from the rails.
Liverpool had altered sufficiently. From it the war stretched grimy fingers to draw us closer into its lethal atmosphere. A sentry paced the landing stage. No more than a handful of people waited there. As we drew closer we all noticed a tall, straight young fellow in a Highland uni- form. He walked up and down impatiently, swinging a little stick, glancing with anxious eyes at the crowd of us by the forward rail. The girl and her mother were near. They cried out.
They glanced at each other tearfully. They commenced with jerky motions to wave their handkerchiefs. The young officer, with a piece of shrapnel near his heart, suddenly swung his stick, paused, and stared up at the tear-stained faces.
"Doesn't he look fit?” the girl cried proudly. "But not really fit—never fit for war again."
More intimate affairs grasped us. Sheep-like we were herded into the dining-room to face the alien officers.
While we awaited our inquisitions the young Highlander entered, exuding a naïve pride in his uniform which had won a permit to pass the guards, which had hastened this moment of fervent greeting. He stood close to us with his wife. For a time they spoke softly, then all at ​ once their voices were raised. The flushed girl exclaimed, as if she had been struck. The husband laughed with an embarrassed indifference.
"Then my letter didn't reach New York until after you had sailed. They are sending me back to the front. Of course I am well enough. It was good of them to give me leave to meet you—"