signal of distress, hastened in search of the survivors, succeeded, after prolonged efforts, in discovering them, and went about the business of saving them under extremely difficult conditions when he had been without rest for thirty-six hours.

Surgeon Navarre of the Third Colonial Regiment, being taken aboard a trawler nearly exhausted by his eighteen hours on a raft, refused to change his drenched clothing or to take any food until he had dressed the hurts of the wounded and looked after the sick. He was prostrated a long while after such superhuman labors.

And I must mention this other incident, which brings tears to my eyes:

Gauthier, Assistant Quartermaster of the Provence, having been taken on board a greatly overloaded raft, was hailed by

a soldier asking for help; he jumped into the water to give him his place, saying: "A sailor's duty is to save the soldiers first of all."

He was picked up, twenty-one hours after the wreck, clinging to a plank.

I call attention also to the devotion and zeal-meriting our profound gratitudeof Lieutenant Sinclair Thomson, commanding the English patrol Marguerite, and of his officers and crew, by whose labors about 300 survivors were taken from the place of the wreck to Malta.

Pray pardon the form of this story, Monsieur le Président. I have written it hurriedly, with a bruised hand, and with a head still in a sad muddle. I wished, before my impending departure for Saloniki, to say to you with all my heart: "That is what these noble fellows did!" BOKANOWSKI.

THE

HE first excitement came when the assistant steward, a man named Kral, who had shipped as a Hollander on the Margam Abbey at Seattle, where the flour was taken on board, got into a fight with the chief engineer over the war. He had long been suspected as a German. The Captain ordered his effects to be searched, and discovered two magazine pistols and papers of discharge from the HamburgAmerican Line. For two days Kral was kept in irons. In the harbor of Pernambuco the Captain signaled for a police boat and went ashore with him, and that was the last I ever heard of him.

We left Pernambuco on March 5, bound for the Canary Islands, and in the middle of the Atlantic we got in touch with an English second-class cruiser by wireless and supplied her with flour and

canned beef. The Captain gave us news of the German raider Möwe, which had captured the Appam about a month before, advising us to take a southerly route, keep our lights out, and paint everything black. At 5 o'clock in the morning, on March 12, the Captain called me to the bridge and said we had been followed all night by what he supposed was a British war vessel. I looked through the glass and told him I thought it was a cargo vessel. Then the pursuer began to speed up. The Captain signaled for all steam, and we made about 14%2 knots, but the other boat kept gaining. Half an hour later she fired a shot across our bow. Whether she was the Möwe or not I do not know, but probably not, as it was reported that the German raider returned safely to Germany about March 5. Fortunately for us the weather grew foggy, we changed our course, and in two hours the pursuing vessel was out of sight.

Two days later we reached Madeira, and after staying four days went to Bordeaux, where we landed a big cargo of flour for Verdun. We received orders

to proceed to Cardiff, Wales, where were the offices of the owners of the vessel. Two days after leaving Bordeaux, while we were at the head of the Bay of Biscay, the first mate, at 3 o'clock in the morning of April 10, sighted a submarine off the starboard bow. We immediately put on steam. The German boat was about two miles off. She chased us and began firing explosive shells, and one rendered us helpless by carrying away half of the propeller. Before that, however, we were in a sinking condition, for fully fifty shots were fired and many struck us below the water line. We carried no guns. The only man on board to be hit was the Chief Engineer. His right shoulder was torn away with a shot as he was putting some provisions in a lifeboat, and he died from his wounds.

We carried two lifeboats. One had twelve holes shot through it, but they were plugged up. The Captain ordered them launched, and we left the ship. One boat pulled toward the Island of Ushant, France, about sixty miles off, while the Captain's boat, in which I was a passenger, turned toward the coast of England, about eighty miles away. After rowing for about two miles, the submarine disappeared. The Margam Abbey was half submerged, but the Captain suggested that we go back, believing we might stand a better chance to be picked up. The Captain and I went aboard to get some medicines from the cabin, when the submarine emerged 300 yards away and fired two more shots, one passing over my head in the cabin. I ran out on the port side and jumped into the water, while the Captain jumped in on the starboard side, where the boat was, and was picked up, and the sailors rowed away, but not before the German commander had called out that he would pick me up. I had on a life belt and was supported by some planks. I was in the water twenty minutes when the submarine came alongside and pulled me in.

The first thing I told the submarine commander was that I was an American. He asked me a lot of questions about the ship, where we were bound, what our cargo was. Then he took me down the conning tower and told the steward to

give me some breakfast. I had hot coffee, ham, and bread, and it surely tasted good. I never saw so much machinery in so small a compass before as in that submarine. She was a big boat, 300 feet long, carrying two six-pound guns, fore and aft, and with two torpedo tubes. The crew numbered about thirty men, all young, fine-looking fellows. I asked the commander if I could take off my clothes to dry them, and he ordered some dry ones to be given to me. I was surely treated very well, and everything about the submarine was in the neatest and cleanest order.

The submarine had in some manner picked up our liferaft and was towing it. The commander and his officers held a consultation, and I was asked to go on deck. It was then that we saw the Margam Abbey sink. We stayed around the place about an hour, and then the commander said he was going to set me adrift on the liferaft. He said I would soon be picked up by one of the English patrol boats, for he said they had been hunting for him for a week, "but tell them from me," he added, "that we are still here."

Well, they put me on the raft in my dry German suit. Half of the crew were on top of the submarine watching me, and they waved their caps and all shouted in English, Good-bye!" The submarine moved off and soon submerged, and that Iwas the last I saw of her.

66

The sea was very calm, and I waited, all alone on the raft, to be rescued. About two hours later the patrol boat Kinalde, a Scotch vessel from Aberdeen, hove in sight and took me aboard. I told them that the two boats with the Margam Abbey's crew were not far distant. We found the Captain's boat in three hours with the body of the engineer. His body was carried to England and sent to his home at Sunderland. About 3 o'clock in the afternoon we picked up the other boat, and at night we got to Falmouth and I slept in the hospital. There was great excitement when we told our story, but we learned afterward that this same German submarine had sunk seven boats within a week.

I give the necessary reply and submit to a further string of such questions. I have to tell the whereabouts of the Post Office, the palace, such and such a theatre, shops, statues, &c. In short, I had to give such information as the Captain could easily check by his Baedeker. I passed the examination with honors.

"You say you lived constantly at-" he does not finish his sentence, as if wishing to trip me up. I repeat the name of a little town in a small, neutral country, and I cannot help laughing inwardly at the perplexity in which the German officer will soon find himself, because I know that a description of this little town will not be found in any of the Baedekers. He searches his Baedeker for the place, and, having found only a tiny dot on the map, angrily gives up the game.

"Now will you follow me," says one of the Lieutenants, and guides me to a corridor, along both sides of which run cubicles like cloak rooms in a miniature theatre in some provincial town. We enter one of the cubicles.

"Will you have the goodness to undress, but, first of all, please take off your boots." The Lieutenant takes the

boots and hands them over to the soldier who accompanies us.

"Have no fear. We shall rip them open and take off the heels, but we will sew them up again and return in good condition."

Of course, it is useless to protest; I take off everything. All my body, right down to my feet and nails, is carefully inspected by means of an electric lamp. The lining of my suit is all ripped open, but is not sewn up again. The contents of my pockets are carefully examined. Needless to say, I have no letters, books, papers, nor documents, except my passport. The Lieutenant takes his glasses and looks through my passport, opens my watch, looks at its mechanism, reads the trade mark of the manufacturers, and then takes my fountain pen, with which I never part, pours out the ink, and is busy probing its inside with a hatpin.

"What can one hide there?" I ask inquisitively.

"Have you never seen pendants, rings, and other things? You hold them up to the light, and through a tiny little point you see highly magnified views of cathedrals, of mountains, or of towns, &c. You can do the same with any document -reduce it photographically and carry it at the bottom of you fountain pen."

I had to agree that this was quite possible. The Lieutenant is chatting freely with me, at the same time, of course, trying to catch me unawares. But I am on my guard. My boots were brought in, and, indeed, on the soles one could see new, neat stitches.

I dress, and at last the final stage is reached. A fifth officer haggles with me about the time I should spend in Germany, and I obtain permission to stay ten days in Berlin and four in Dresden.

I breathe freely once more and go on the platform. I look at my watch; all these investigations and searches have taken up altogether fifty-five minutes. I find my place in the train and make myself comfortable. Four hours hence I shall be in Berlin.

Somehow I cannot believe it, and it seems to me that it is all a dream.

I

KNOW not in what manner our Russian views of certain national types are being formed. The English, for instance, we always thought cold, calculating, sly. At the beginning of the war Sir Edward Grey, speaking for an entire nation, seemed almost sphinx-like in his baffling manner. Kitchener seemed the personification of the severe ruler, who will not know human weakness. John Bull is pictured by the cartoonists of all countries as a fat, slyly-winking glutton. And all this turned out to be untrue and just about the reverse in reality.

John Bull is generally a thin, tall man, and simple-natured. The austere Kitchener, who speaks only in monosyllables, is in reality but a representative figure, magnificently adapted for advertising purposes on the screen or posters. They are practical and efficient in their task, but neither this task, nor the organization, nor yet the domination of the world is their goal; not even England for the English. It seems to me the English dream now of universal harmony, when all forces shall be strained, all passions free; when no adventure shall disturb the peace and calm reigning on earth; when falsehood, diplomacy, and guns shall become antiquated.

Sir Edward Grey is the most simple and sincere man in England. Having decided to show us, the Russian journalists, the army, works, and fleet, the English have shown us many secrets, in their simplicity, which we should have forgotten instantly. And we were not even told that it was forbidden to write or talk about them, leaving this to our own sense of decency.

For three days, spent at the front, I studied these young and old Englishmen. They are frank, candid, with that ever-present spark of humor somewhere in their eyes. The difference between them is that one commands entire armies hile the other has charge of fifty men

in a trench. And every one of them is first of all a man and a gentleman.

Another mistake we make concerning the British army. Some of us say the only things they do there is to play football, eat pudding, and let the Allies bleed to death. But the British army is great. Haig told us that it now occupies a fourth of the entire front. It began with a hundred thousand and is already passed the million mark. But they think that it is not sufficient for a decisive offensive. And so the English are preparing to strike a terrible and crushing blow at Germany. They are accumulating shells and men, they build whole cities of concrete, where food, clothing, and ammunition from all corners of the world are being gathered, and daily there flows from the Isles to the Continent a river of troops and artillery.

On the third day we finally succeeded in getting, to the first line trenches and seeing with our own eyes a little part of that impregnable wall, behind which the English are preparing their blow. At 10 o'clock we arrived in the woods, which were but recently in German hands.

It was warm and clear. White clouds slowly swam in the blue of the sky. Naked, the forest was full of the roar of cannon and shrieking of shells. Somewhere in the distance grenades were exploding. And in the intervals of silence one could hear the chirping of birds. Many trees lay uprooted, and many others bore the marks of shrapnel on their trunks. We entered the trenches. Here we could walk in couples only. Mr. Balfour and I passed through a hole to the extreme trench, which is one endless ditch, running from the sea to Switzerland. It has the depth of a man, and zigzags regularly from horizon to horizon, each of its two sides protected by sacks of sand. It is the ditch that has called a halt to the German hordes, defying millions of tons of steel. A Scotsman was lying on bags on

his back, his legs protruding into the air. At his head was his rifle. In his hands were two small mirrors. He had been lying thus since morning, looking into the glasses, awaiting the appearance of a German helmet on the other side of the sand bags. Another one had made a piece of metal his mirror, also awaiting his prey. Some were cleaning their rifles, some repairing the damage done by grenades.

We were returning. Shells were flying and bursting in our direction, and an iron bird was circling above us. And then some shrapnel shrilled over us, on its way to the German trenches. I looked at

Balfour. His nose was all covered with mud. "The d-d Boches!" he said; "a grenade exploded, and then I suddenly felt something wet on my face."

We went to the famous hill, from where the enormous panorama of the battlefield unfolds itself to the observer's eye. It is a high and abrupt hill. There stretches before one's view an infinite space, in the background of which, far, far in the distance, one could discern the white tower of unfortunate Ypres. Ypres, the wonderful capital of Flanders, has been erased from the surface of the earth. Only by some miracle has the tower escaped.

You

OU know what an airman generally looks like, if he is getting ready to do a pretty big climb, under the regulation circumstances of war work; warm clothing, fur gauntlets, a thickly padded helmet; everybody is probably familiar with these attributes of the airman, at least from pictures.

Here, beyond the Caucasus, we dress differently. We do not enjoy the comparative comforts with which the aviation squads carry on their work on the other war fronts, where they have warm quarters and repair shops within easy reach. We have to fit out under an ordinary service tent, and how much it protects you from the icy cold you can easily imagine!

Picture to yourself a human form in underwear, which other human beings are leisurely and effectively wrapping in -newspapers! Oh, paper keeps out the cold splendidly! Any florist at home will tell you that. And here, where we see flowers only in our dreams, we have only one prayer to address to you: Send us

newspapers, more newspapers! We not only read them, we wear them!

The paper packing is the first part of the airman's toilet. Next comes an undervest, then the uniform, a fur jacket or cloak and trousers. Sometimes these latter are fur-covered above, when the aviator ready for flight is hardly distinguished in appearance from a bear. Warm felt shoes; huge fur gloves, in which you have difficulty at first in wiggling your fingers. A warm helmet with holes only for the eyes and mouth. last detail of the toilet is the "makeup"; the airman's face, as much of it as remains uncovered, is thickly smeared with vaseline as a protection against the icy cold.

The

In the aerodrome the motor of the aeroplane, set at low speed, is already humming. Human figures are bustling about it.

They clothe and warm it also-into the radiator they pour almost boiling water; the oil cylinders are filled with lubricating oil heated over wood fires. These are the ordinary Winter measures.