the manner of old friends, and waited for something else. It never
came. The ship's officers gradually faded from the decks and the
passengers, after standing around foolishly for a time, disappeared
one by one into their cabins and bloomed out again with their
life-belts moulted! That was the last we heard of the boat-drill
or the life-belts. The French are just that casual.

But one evening at late twilight the ship went a-flutter over a grisly
incident that brought us close up to the war. We were gathered in
the dusk looking at a sailing ship far over to the south--a mere
speck on the horizon's edge. Signals began to twinkle from her and
we felt our ship give a lurch and turn north zigzagging at full
speed. The signals of the sailing ship were distress signals, but
we sped away from her as fast as our engines would take us, for,
though her signals may have been genuine, also they may have been
a U-boat lure. Often the Germans have used the lure of distress
signals on a sailing ship and when a rescuer has appeared, the U-boat
has sent to death the Good Samaritan of the sea! It is awful. But
the German has put mercy off the sea!

Some way the average man goes back to his home environment for his
moral standards, and that night as we walked the deck, Henry broke
out with this: "I've been thinking about this U-boat business;
how it would be if we had the German's job. I have been trying to
think if there is any one in Wichita who could go out and run a
U-boat the way these Germans run U-boats, and I've been trying to
imagine him sitting on the front porch of the Country Club or down
at the Elks Club talking about it, telling how he lured the captain
of a ship by his distress signal to come to the rescue of a sinking
ship and then destroyed the rescuer, and I've been trying to figure