Perhaps some sailor on watch on a misty evening blown far out of his course away to the north saw something ghostly once on an iceberg floating by, or heard some voice in the dimness that seemed like the voice of man, and came home with this weird story.  And perhaps, as the story passed from lip to lip, men found enough justice in it to believe it true.  So it came down the centuries.

Will seafarers ages hence on dim October evenings, or on nights when the moon is ominous through mist, red and huge and uncanny, see a lonely figure sometimes on the loneliest part of the sea, far north of where the Lusitania sank, gathering all the cold it can?  Will they see it hugging a crag of iceberg wan as itself, helmet, cuirass and ice pale-blue in the mist together?  Will it look towards them with ice-blue eyes through the mist, and will they question it, meeting on those bleak seas?  Will it answer —­ or will the North wind howl like voices?  Will the cry of seals be heard, and ice floes grinding, and strange birds lost upon the wind that night, or will it speak to them in those distant years and tell them how it sinned, betraying man?

It will be a grim, dark story in that lonely part of the sea, when he confesses to sailors, blown too far north, the dreadful thing he plotted against man.  The date on which he is seen will be told from sailor to sailor.  Queer taverns of distant harbours will know it well.  Not many will care to be at sea that day, and few will risk being driven by stress of weather on the Kaiser’s night to the bergs of the haunted part of sea.

And yet for all the grimness of the pale-blue phantom, with cuirass and helmet and eyes shimmering on deadly icebergs, and yet for all the sorrow of the wrong he did against man, the women drowned and the children, and all the good ships gone, yet will the horrified mariners meeting him in the mist grudge him no moment of the day he has earned, or the coolness he gains from the bergs, because of the kindness he did to the wounded men.  For the mariners in their hearts are kindly men, and what a soul gains from kindness will seem to them well deserved.

Last Scene of All

After John Calleron was hit he carried on in a kind of twilight of the mind.  Things grew dimmer and calmer; harsh outlines of events became blurred; memories came to him; there was a singing in his ears like far-off bells.  Things seemed more beautiful than they had a while ago; to him it was for all the world like evening after some quiet sunset, when lawns and shrubs and woods and some old spire look lovely in the late light, and one reflects on past days.  Thus he carried on, seeing things dimly.  And what is sometimes called ``the roar of battle,’’ those aërial voices that snarl and moan and whine and rage at soldiers, had grown dimmer too.  It all seemed further away, and littler, as far things are.  He still heard the bullets:  there is something so violently and intensely sharp in the snap of passing bullets at short ranges that you hear them in deepest thought, and even in dreams.  He heard them, tearing by, above all things else.  The rest seemed fainter and dimmer, and smaller and further away.