Each time that he had read in the newspapers of their exploits in the North Sea a wave had passed over the conscience of this simple, frank and upright man.  They were accustomed to attack treacherously hidden in the water, disguising their long and murderous eyes like the visual antennae of the monsters of the deep.  This aggression without danger appeared to revive in his soul the outraged souls of a hundred Mediterranean ancestors, cruel and piratical perhaps, but who, nevertheless, had sought the enemy face to face with naked breast, battle-axe in hand, and the barbed harpoon for boarding ship as their only means of struggle.

“If they would torpedo only the armed vessels!” he added.  “War is a form of savagery, and it is necessary to shut the eyes to its treacherous blows, accepting them as glorious achievements....  But there is something more than that:  you know it well.  They sink merchant vessels, and passenger ships carrying women, carrying little children....”

His weather-beaten cheeks assumed the color of a baked brick.  His eyes flashed with a bluish splendor.  He was feeling the same wrath that he had experienced when reading the accounts of the first torpedoing of the great transatlantic steamer on the coast of England.

He was seeing the defenseless and peaceable throng crowding to the boats that were capsizing; the women throwing themselves into the sea with children in their arms; all the deadly confusion of a catastrophe....  Then the submarine arising to contemplate its work; the Germans grouped on the decks of dripping steel, laughing and joking, satisfied with the rapid result of their labors; and for a distance of many miles the sea was filled with black bulks dragged slowly along by the waves—­men floating on their backs, immovable, with their glassy eyes fixed on the sky; children with their fair hair clinging like masks to their livid face; corpses of mothers pressing to their bosom with cold rigidity little corpses of babies, assassinated before they could even know what life might mean.

When reading the account of these crimes, Toni had naturally thought of his own wife and children, imagining what their condition might have been on that steamer, experiencing the same fate as its innocent passengers.  This imagination had made him feel so intense a wrath that he even mistrusted his own self-control on the day that he should again encounter German sailors in any port....  And Ferragut, an honorable man, a good captain whose praises every one was sounding, could he possibly aid in transplanting such horrors as these to the Mediterranean?...