The good food, the better working conditions, the relationship between officers and men is also very much due to the maritime trade union struggle. In the days when Westbrook Pegler led the vicious campaign of lies and false accusations against our merchant service, the legend was fostered that all merchant seamen were draft-dodgers and received fantastic pay. On the Gray Victory , the wiper who thought that someone had to be down in the engine room was a small, chubby Jewish boy from St. Louis, and Chips, the carpenter, past sixty, was a former tournament bridge player. A messman went to sea at fifty-two because he couldn't sit back any more, and the first officer, who limped from a piece of shrapnel in his kneecap, was a serious ship career man. On the Gray Victory at least a dozen men had a warm, constant interest in art.
Seamen still make bits of jewelry, shaping the metal slowly and patiently.
The bosun loved Huxley and James Cain, and had them both in his private library. As the war becomes a thing of the past and yet the still more distant past, it will be more and more difficult to recall the roll of the gray ships. All too few reporters sailed on their long, seemingly endless journeys. But it should be recalled that there was a time, not so long ago, when their bulging holds were all of the thin thread which kept civilization from perishing.