afternoon, seven or eight days out, we had notice at noon that we would try on our life preservers that afternoon.  The life preservers were thrown on our beds by the stewards and at three o’clock each passenger appeared beside the life-boat assigned to him, donned his life-belt which gave him a ridiculously stuffed appearance, answered to a roll-call, guyed those about him after the manner of old friends, and waited for something else.  It never came.  The ship’s officers gradually faded from the decks and the passengers, after standing around foolishly for a time, disappeared one by one into their cabins and bloomed out again with their life-belts moulted!  That was the last we heard of the boat-drill or the life-belts.  The French are just that casual.

But one evening at late twilight the ship went a-flutter over a grisly incident that brought us close up to the war.  We were gathered in the dusk looking at a sailing ship far over to the south—­a mere speck on the horizon’s edge.  Signals began to twinkle from her and we felt our ship give a lurch and turn north zigzagging at full speed.  The signals of the sailing ship were distress signals, but we sped away from her as fast as our engines would take us, for, though her signals may have been genuine, also they may have been a U-boat lure.  Often the Germans have used the lure of distress signals on a sailing ship and when a rescuer has appeared, the U-boat has sent to death the Good Samaritan of the sea!  It is awful.  But the German has put mercy off the sea!

Some way the average man goes back to his home environment for his moral standards, and that night as we walked the deck, Henry broke out with this:  “I’ve been thinking about this U-boat business; how it would be if we had the German’s job.  I have been trying to think if there is any one in Wichita who could go out and run a U-boat the way these Germans run U-boats, and I’ve been trying to imagine him sitting on the front porch of the Country Club or down at the Elks Club talking about it, telling how he lured the captain of a ship by his distress signal to come to the rescue of a sinking ship and then destroyed the rescuer, and I’ve been trying to figure out how the fellows sitting around him would take it.  They’d get up and leave.  He would be outcast as unspeakable and no brag or bluff or blare of victory would gloss over his act.  We simply don’t think the German way.  We have a loyalty to humanity deeper than our patriotism.  There are certain things self-respecting men can’t do and live in Wichita.  But there seem to be no restrictions in Germany.  The U-boat captain using the distress signal as a lure probably holds about such a place in his home town as Charley Carey, our banker, or Walter Innes, our dry goods man.  He is doubtless a leading citizen of some German town; doubtless a kind father, a good husband and maybe a pillar of the church.  And I suppose town and home and church will applaud him when he goes back to Germany to brag about his treachery.  In Wichita, town and home and church would be ashamed of Charley Carey and Walter Innes if they came back to brag about killing men who were lured to death by responding to the call of distress.”