Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 January 1915 — WAR DRAMA AT SEA [ARTICLE]

WAR DRAMA AT SEA

Remarkable Letter From a French Naval Officer. Pictures a Night of Tense Watching In the Dark-—ls Broken by the Discovery and Destruction of a Torpedo Boat. Paris. —There has come to me, writes Paul Scott Mowrer in the Chicago- News, a remarkable letter from a naval officer, who is cruising with the French fleet in the Adriatic, hunt* tag the Austrian foe. It gives a vivid picture of the solitary drama of war at sea. Here it is: “It is a black night Thb wind is terrible, the swell monstrous. All lights are out Darker than the night without a single noise aboard, the' Shipß, one behind the other, watch upon the sea that nothing may pass. Ten miles to the north, ten miles to the south, they are holding their blind course. All seems to sleep.

“Our lookouts at bow and stem, lost In shadow, are roiling and pitching like phantoms, while not a single sound breaks the Incomprehensible silence. But the cannon are ready. There Is a man behind each loaded piece, his finger on the trigger, never closing his eyes from the moment he goes on duty to the moment of his relief. Aloft, the searchlights, too, are ready at touch of a button to blaze forth, to seek out, to harass. And on the bridge, the officer on whom depends a thousand lives, the officer of the watch, alone before God, his eyes on his glass, peers for hours and hours out into the black night and the swell. There must be no failing now of sight or mind or decision. That moment of falling might be the very one in which the enemy, crouching betweed two waves, launohed a torpedo or sowed a sinking mine. “For an, instant in the unreal distance, great paint brushes of light appear. They grope across the sky mill sea, stop suddenly, and the wind brings the sound of a storm of shells. Then no more. Lights and cannon cease. The night, the swell, the silence. But the heart beats faster. Out there, ’they’ are roving. Perhaps presently it will be my turn. I want to smash the lenses of the glass and illuminate the whole stretch of ocean. Which way will they come? Suddenly something white shines on a crest, like the mustache of foam under a bow. "‘On guard! Fifteen hundred yards! Eighty degrees to starboard! Light searchlights! More to the left! Leeway fifty-eight! Fire! “All the crouching shadows leap asunder. In the bright sheaf of light is a pallid specter With three or four smokestacks which plunges like a greyhound over the foam. Fifteen cannon at once are spitting ceaselessly. Our phantom ship has hfecome a volcano. “ ’More in the right! A thousand yards!’ "The hostile torpedo boat disappear? In an aureole of blows, behind fountains -of water, very white under the livid electricity. But still on it comes, bringing death. “ ‘Eight hundred yards!’ "The blows are falling nearer to It. They make a wall ot water .and iron. In the aureole of spray appears something red, black, yellow, like a hit in the eye. A shell has struck the belly of the torpedo boat and It has blown up. '“Cease fire! Searchlights follow to the end!' ? “We go to look, to pick np the dead and the wounded. Nothing is left—hardly a few splinters of wood. ’“Lights out!’ “We return to our course, to the watch, the silence, the obscurity. The men who serve the guns lie down. The gunners stand and wait. The officer of the watch, who has saved a thousand lives, once more stares searchlngly into the dangerous darkness. The boat rolls pitches. It is cold and gloomy. But the sea is l a little freer and France better protected.”