Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 March 1918 — AMUSING PIECE OF “NERVE” [ARTICLE]

AMUSING PIECE OF “NERVE”

How Cool Impudence of Young British Naval Officers Relieved Tenslon of Situation."-" ■■ - -;~7 In “Facing the Hindenburg Line,* by Burris A. Jenkins, may be found a number of incidents in which naval men prove their coolness and heroism. Nobody knows all the stories of coolness apd heroism among the naval men, says the author. We shall not learn them till the war is over, but here is one that perhaps the censors will allow to go by. It was told by a medical officer who was aboard the Franconia when she was sunk acting as a transport. “We had five or six naval officers aboard. They were sitting in the smoking room —remember the smoking lounge in the old Franconia? It was very long, as long as this dining room and twice as broad. They had just ordered whisky sodas. Suddenly there was an explosion and the steel floor of the smoking room just buckled up and burst apart in the middle of the ship. One of those officers called the steward and said: “ ‘I ask you to witness, steward, that we have paid for these whisky sodas and have not had time to drink- them.* “Thenthe rascals went below, got on their lifebelts, came back again, asked the steward for a big sheet of foolscap, wrote out a long, ‘we, the undersigned,’ setting forth that they had ordered six whisky sodas, for which they had nine shillings, with a sixpence tip, and had not been allowed to drink them. Thereupon they entered a claim against the British government for the nine shillings and sixpence, with accrued Interest from date. Then they walked in a body up to the bridge and handed it to the skipper. The old man told me afterward he never was so grateful to anybody as to these cool young devils for the steadying and bucking up influence of their impudence.*