Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 287, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 December 1920 — REAL FACTS STRANGER THAN WEIRDEST FICTION STORIES [ARTICLE]

REAL FACTS STRANGER THAN WEIRDEST FICTION STORIES

Imagination of the Most Gifted Novelist Outdone by Life’s Real Romances—No One Could Have Imagined or Written Such a Stupendous Tragedy as the War the World Has Just Gone Through.

New York.—Among the bright-cov-ered magazines on the news stands Is one whose name announces that it Is devoted to true stories, and a subtitle calls attention to the good old proverb that “truth Is stranger than fiction.” Truth in this case makes the concession of trying to appear as much like fiction as possible. But It is not in the realm of imagination that one would look first for the verification of our ancient adage that truth Is stranger than fiction. The news of the world as It is turned out day by day is to a very large extent concerned with the strange and unusual thing, often paralleling fiction, often going beyond it. The variety of the possible combinations of circumstances Is so great as to surpass the imagination of the most fertile fictionlst, says the New York Times. Ask any one what events chronicled In the newspapers are or have been stranger than fiction, and the first answer will probably be the war Itself. The war, certainly. No one did and no one could have! imagined or written down such a stupendous tragedy as the world has just gone through. It is a case where the plain facts have far outdistanced the fictionjsts, as „ well as the historians looking into the future. Old Bernardi, knowing what the German ruling class had in mind, knew that war with France and Russia was coming and the world as a whole had slowly been prepared through years for a European clash. But no one foresaw a conflict in which the whole world would be Involved, a war which would cost millions of lives and money running Into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

What Stranger Than Thia? Not only the war as a thing in itself, but unnumbered phases and incidents of the war passed beyond the imagination of the men who wrote before 1914. America’s part in it alone forms an almost unbelievable episode. What writer would have dared, a decade even. ago, to have told of an American army of 2,000,000 men fighting over the old battlefields of Northern France and Belgium? What brilliant fictionlst could have pictured the results of the war? The restoration of crushed nations of Europe, the break-up of old empires? What revolutionary genius of fiction would have fancied a Russia under the Bolshevik! for nearly three years? Who could have given an air of reality to a romance In 1913 dealing with the fate of the Czar of Russia or Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany? The true stories of the heroic deeds of the war, the personal experiences and tragic Incidents, are in many cases too strange and unreal to have passed unquestioned in the pages of fiction. A gun with a range of seventy-five miles drops a shell into a Paris church at the moment it is crowded for Good Friday mass. No wonder that for days the world would not believe that such a thing had happened! The first use of gas by the Germans against the British in the Ypres sector was another fact the world could not bring Itself to believe without great effort. The first air raids, the first submarine attack on passenger ships and even the announcement that the German troops were marching on France through Belgium upset all the order of thinking in a , supposedly sane world. A world which has lived through the days since August, 1914, will have no reason to doubt. that truth is stranger than fiction. Outdoes Jules Verne.

For years the imaginative story of Jules Verne on submarines, called “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," was a bromide among writers and talkers who wished to mention the ultra-fictional and the fantastically Imaginative. Tet the vividness of that story contained nothing so picturesque and certainly nothing so true as that epic tale of underseas suffering and heroism brought into this port and Philadelphia from off the Delaware capes recently by the survivors of the American submarine S-5. Disabled In a practice crash dive, the submarine was tilted by her Commander so that her stern stood out of water- and while cataracts swept through her compartments as the doors were opened between them, officers and men climbed to the part of the ship that stood above the waves —not knowing that any part of the vessel was above the water line. Then for nearly thirty hours the crew battled for life, without drinking water, In heavy atmosphere; poisoned with ■ Chlorine gas, and with only scraps of food to eat. They ripped a hole In the steel plates of the vessel, put a red shirt on a pipe and waved their signal until help came. Then, each disclaiming credit for heroism by giving praise to some one else lh the crew, they were rescued by steamship captains and a heroic engineer who labored for hours to cut a large hole through the submarine’s plates. Every ship that comes into the port brings some story, perhaps aad, herhups amusing, that matches Dana or Cooper or Conrad. Truth, but like Action, la the story of Jacob Cohen,

who has been called the "Man Without a Country,” and the “Human Shuttle,” who sails the high seas from country to country, everywhere deemed an undesirable and turned away by the Immigration authorities. With no country to go to, he sails from port to port, a citizen of Neptune’s domains, perhaps changing ships occasionally, but always traveling the, seas. It Is tlnw for him to arrive hack at some Amencan port). from Buenos Ayres or some other remote port—and for a few days the newspapers again will record his story which Is stranger than fiction. Stowaways Are Common. Stowaways by hundreds come Into this, port from all the countries of the world and their stories have been told so many times that sometimes the newspapers omit any mention of them. They range from lads of 10 and 12 years old to old men with the vision of adventure In a new land still before their eyes—and some are women. There was recently the true story of the Greek steamship Thessaloniki that fought ninety-mile gales for a week during the heaviest winter weather on the Atlantic, with engines disabled and food lockers empty, until help stood by to take off crew and passengers. The ship was never seen again. Then there is the mystery of the Cyclops, which never reached her port and was swallowed up in the high seas. These are stories the reader feels to be far more strange than fiction, for while fiction seems to struggle to be real or realistic, the truth seems to struggle to be unreal and fantastic, or at least romantic.

Plots of many of the great operas, of some great novels, and off many works of fiction not so great, are based upon police court cases, upon murders, thievery, or some other crime. Accompanied by (music and surrounded by the jewels of the Diamond Horseshoe, the sordid crime story may become “high art" In many of the hundred or so murders In this city every year frequently there are a score which, before the police step in, are just as romantic as any love story in the fiction of Thomas Hardy—although Hardy carrited his cases to the courts and frequently to the gqjlows. There are murders for love, murders for great spoils and sums of money, and stranger than any fiction are the unsolved murders committed in this city in silk, bond and whisky thefts. Strange Murders.

Where in fiction Is anything more fantastic than that unsolved murder of two Chinese government representatives in the Chinese embassy at Washington or some of the Chinese murders In this city? Or the Italian vendettas in this city, many of whose killings never find their way into print because the crimes are so numerous? And the “romantic murders,” with disappointed love as the motive, how many foolish swains can be found each year in a metropolitan district of 8,000,000, and how many suicides are committed after disappointments In a chief interest in life? In the hand of a master plotter and character sketcher they are romance, but in the police records they are merely sordid, unpleasant chronicles, but nevertheless, like fiction and true. A few months ago Major Alden G. McMurtry, an officer who was disappointed at not seeing service in France, entered the cellar of a mansion in Greenwich, Conn., and, firing at pistol flashes in the dark, after bullets had smashed his hand electric lamp with a tinkling of glass, killed two burglars who were waiting there to slay him. There is the same sort

of fight in the basement of "The House of a Thousand Candles,” by Meredith Nicholson. Sherlock Homes fought his captors in the gas chamber and fooled them by placing his lighted cigar tip on a ledge In the dark chamber so that they rushed against the wall and he escaped. There is the fight in the roundhouse in “Kidnapped”—and scores of other fights of similar nature in other of Stevenson’s works and In those of other writers. But Major McMurtry’s act of heroism was not brain figment—lt was truth!

Get Great Wealth. Hundreds of Instances have beer* related of persons having great wealth thrust upon them suddenly in the last few years, as well as instances of persons in humble circumstances who, by some turn of luck, made great sums of money merely by getting some recognition for their natural abilities. The latest case of luck is that of Arthur T. Walker, private secretary to Edward F. Searles, who was the heir of his employer’s estate, variously estimated at between >5,000,000 and >50,000,000, but which later estimates have placed near the first figure. He had worked twelve years for Searles at a small salary, was very shy, of modest habits, and had no Intimation that he was to be the heir to millions. Many fictional stories lately have had as their plots financial fights among wealthy men in Wall street, in business, or on the Stock exchange. Can any of these stories surpass in interest the true story of the fight for the last few months between Allan A. Ryan, son of Thomas Fortune Ryan, and the New York Stock exchange over the exclusion of Stutz Motors stock, and the long controversy over settlement with brokers who were “short” of the stock? And there are other true stories fully as good—of races across the ocean for large orders in foreign countries, for concessions and other big stakes. Legion, too, are the true stories of thefts of jewels and bonds in amounts running into the hundreds of thousands. Who would have believed that any person could have stolen nearly >300,000 worth of gems from a safety deposit box .crowded lobby of the Hotel Biltmore, get away and keep the theft hidden for months? Yet the loss of that sum of gems was discovered on June 13, 1919, by Mra. Clarence Millhlser of Richmond, Va., and even at first the authenticity of the story was doubted by the police and other men who have access to reports of big robberies. Among the jewels were thirty large pearls and a diamond said to be about 20 carats in weight All but about >46,000 worth of the Jewels were recovered by the police and private' detectives, and a man is now serving a term in Sing Sing. And there are other immense thefts of moving picture films, silks, cash —and who hasn’t read the stories of the bond thefts running into millions?

Stories of Heroism. True stories of heroism? There was the story only two weeks ago of the fireman who had been kicked out of a fire department who saw a fire in a tenement and, at the risk of his own life, saved a family of seven from death in the flames and won reinstatement in the department for himself. Hardly a week goes by that the Are or police department does not record some thrilling story of heroism .among its members. And there to another host of stories of the gallant traffic cop who saves the beautiful girl from sure death under her runaway horse’s hoofs and then marries her. Can Irvin S. Cobb or Ellis Parker Butler match this true story to these shaky days of prohibition—this story that to writ to letters bold In the police records in the West Forty-sev-enth street station? A man who had drunk freely of new brew left his rendezvous in a daze, and, reaching the street, leaned against a post. He wanted another drink, and remembering that the prescription to the place where he imbibed was to press a button a certain number of times, he pressed a button; but this one hap* pened to be on a police signal and he didn’t get his highball from the angry cop who answered the signal.