Daily we searched the empty seas until our eyes hurt us; but, except
that we had one ship's concert and one brisk gale, and that just before
dusk on the fifth day out, the weather being then gray and misty, we saw
wallowing along, hull down on the starboard bow, an English cruiser with
two funnels, nothing happened at all. Even when we landed at Liverpool
nothing happened to suggest that we had reached a country actively
engaged in war, unless you would list the presence of a few khaki-clad
soldiers on the landing stage and the painful absence of porters to
handle our baggage as evidences of the same. I remember seeing Her
Grace the Duchess of Marlborough sitting hour after hour on a baggage
truck, waiting for her heavy luggage to come off the tardy tender and up
the languid chute into the big dusty dockhouse.
I remember, also, seeing women, with their hats flopping down in their
faces and their hair all streaming, dragging huge trunks across the
floor; and if all of us had not been in the same distressful fix we
could have appreciated the humor of the spectacle of a portly high
dignitary of the United States Medical Corps shoving a truck piled high
with his belongings, and shortly afterward, with the help of his own
wife, loading them on the roof of an infirm and wheezy taxicab.
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