the soldiers for the great war—­the volunteers, the National Guard, the soldiers of the new army; half accoutred, clad in nondescript uniforms, but proud and incorrigibly young.  There had been banquets the week before, and speeches and flag rituals in public, but the night before, there had been tears and good-byes across the land.  And all this in a few weeks; indeed it began during the long days in which we two sailed through the gulf stream, we two whose departure from our towns had seemed such a bold and hazardous adventure.  When one man leaves a town upon an unusual enterprise, it may look foolhardy; but when a hundred leave upon the same adventure, it seems commonplace.  The danger in some way seems to be divided by the numbers.  Yet in truth, numbers often multiply the danger.  There was little danger for Henry and me on the good ship Espagne with Red Cross stenographers and nurses and ambulance drivers and Y. M. C. A. workers.  No particular advantage would come to the German arms by torpedoing us.  But as the Espagne, carrying her peaceful passengers, all hurrying to Europe on merciful errands, passed down the river and into the harbour that afternoon, we had seen a great grey German monster passenger boat, an interned leviathan of the sea in her dock.  We had been told of how cunningly the Germans had scuttled her; how they had carefully relaid electric wires so that every strand had to be retraced to and from its source, how they had turned the course of water pipes, all over the ship, how they had drawn bolts and with blow-pipes had rotted nuts and rods far in the dark places of the ship’s interior, how they had scientifically disarranged her boilers so that they would not make steam, and as we saw the German boat looming up, deck upon deck, a floating citadel, with her bristling guns, we thought what a prize she would be when she put out to sea loaded to the guards with those handsome boys whom we had been seeing hustling about the country as they went to their training camps.  Even to consider these things gave us a feeling of panic, and the recollection of the big boat in the dock began to bring the war to us, more vividly than it had come before.  And then our first real martial adventure happened, thus: 

As we leaned over the rail that first night talking of many things, in the blackness, without a glimmer from any porthole, with the decks as dark as Egypt, the ship shot ahead at twenty knots an hour.  In peace times it would be regarded as a crazy man’s deed, to go whizzing along at full speed without lights.  Henry had taken two long puffs on his cigar when out from the murk behind us came a hand that tapped his shoulder, and then a voice spoke: 

“You’ll have to put out that cigar, sir.  A submarine could see that five miles on a night like this!”

So Henry doused his light, and the war came right home to us.