Titanic - Filson Young (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

into their own. It was not Time, nor the creatures and things of Time, that received their final crown there; but things that have nothing to do with Time, qualities that, in their power of rising beyond all human limitations, we must needs call divine.

The Titanic was in more senses than one a fool’s paradise. There is nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy, and far as he may advance in might and knowledge and cunning, her blind strength will always be more than his match. But men easily forget this; they wish to forget it; and the beautiful and comfortable and agreeable equipment of this ship helped them to forget it. You may cover the walls of a ship with rare woods and upholster them with tapestries and brocades, but it is the bare steel walls behind them on which you depend to keep out the water; it is the strength of those walls, relatively to the strength of such natural forces as may be arrayed against them, on which the safety of the ship depends. If they are weaker than something which assails them, the water must come in and the ship must sink. It was assumed too readily that, in the case of the Titanic, these things could not happen; it was assumed too readily that if in the extreme event they did happen, the manifold appliances for saving life would be amply sufficient for the security of the passengers. Thus they lived in a serene confidence such as no ship’s company ever enjoyed before, or will enjoy again for a long time to come. And there were gathered about them almost all those accessories of material life which are necessary to the paradise of fools, and are extremely agreeable to wiser men.

It was this perfect serenity of their condition which made so poignant the tragedy of their sudden meeting with death—that pale angel whom every man knows that he must some day encounter, but whom most of us hope to find at the end of some road a very long way off waiting for us with comforting and soothing hands. We do not expect to meet him suddenly turning the corner of the street, or in an environment of refined and elegant conviviality, or in the midst of our noonday activities, or at midnight on the high seas when we are dreaming on feather pillows. But it was thus that those on the Titanic encountered him, waiting there in the ice and the starlight, arresting the ship’s progress with his out-stretched arm, and standing by, waiting, while the sense of his cold presence gradually sank like a frost into their hearts.

To say that all the men who died on the Titanic were heroes would be as absurd as to say that all who were saved were cowards. There were heroes among both groups and cowards among both groups, as there must be among any large number of men. It is the collective behaviour and the general attitude towards disaster that is important at such a time; and in this respect there is ample evidence that death scored no advantage in the encounter, and that, though he took a spoil of bodies that had been destined for him since the moment of their birth, he left the hearts unconquered. In that last half-hour before the end, when every one on the ship was under sentence of death, modern civilization went through a severe test. By their bearing in that moment those fated men and women had to determine whether, through the long years of peace and increase of material comfort and withdrawal from contact with the cruder elements of life, their race had deteriorated in courage and morale. It is only by such great tests that we can determine how we stand in these matters, and, as they periodically recur, measure our advance or decline. And the human material there made the test a very severe one; for there were people on the Titanic who had so entrenched themselves behind ramparts of wealth and influence as to have wellnigh forgotten that, equally with the waif and the pauper, they were exposed to the caprice of destiny; and who might have been forgiven if, in that awful moment of realization, they had shown the white feather and given themselves over to panic. But there is ample evidence that these men stood the test equally as well as those whose occupation and training made them familiar with the risks of the sea, to which they were continually exposed, and through which they might reasonably expect to come to just such an end. There was no theatrical heroism, no striking of attitudes, or attempt to escape from the dread reality in any form of spiritual hypnosis; they simply stood about the decks, smoking cigarettes, talking to one another, and waiting for their hour to strike. There is nothing so hard, nothing so entirely dignified, as to be silent and quiet in the face of an approaching horror.

That was one form of heroism, which will make the influence of this thing deathless long after the memory of it has faded as completely from the minds of men as sight or sign of it has faded from that area of ocean where, two miles above the sunken ship, the rolling blue furrows have smoothed away all trace of the struggles and agonies that embittered it. But there was another heroism which must be regarded as the final crown and glory of this catastrophe—not because it is exceptional, for happily it is not, but because it continued and confirmed a tradition of English sea life that should be a tingling inspiration to everyone who has knowledge of it. The men who did the work of the ship were no composite, highly drilled body like the men in the navy who, isolated for months at a time and austerely disciplined, are educated into an esprit de corps and sense of responsibility that make them willing, in moments of emergency, to sacrifice individual safety to the honour of the ship and of the Service to which they belong. These stokers, stewards, and seamen were the ordinary scratch crew, signed on at Southampton for one round trip to New York and back; most of them had never seen each other or their officers before; they had none of the training or the securities afforded by a great national service; they were simply—especially in the case of the stokers—men so low in the community that they were able to live no pleasanter life than that afforded by the stokehold of a ship—an inferno of darkness and noise and commotion and insufferable heat—men whose experience of the good things of life was half an hour’s breathing of the open sea air between their spells of labour at the furnaces, or a drunken spree ashore whence, after being poisoned by cheap drink and robbed by joyless women of the fruits of their spell of labour, they are obliged to return to it again to find the means for another debauch. Not the stuff out of which one would expect an austere heroism to be evolved. Yet such are the traditions of the sea, such is the power of those traditions and the spirit of those who interpret them, that some of these men—not all, but some—remained down in the Titanic’s stokeholds long after she had struck, and long after the water, pouring like a cataract through the rent in her bottom and rising like a tide round the black holes where they worked, had warned them that her doom, and probably theirs, was sealed.

In the engine-room were another group of heroes, men of a far higher type, with fine intelligences, trained in all the subtleties and craft of modern ships, men with education and imagination who could see in their mind’s eye all the variations of horror that might await them. These men also continued at their routine tasks in the engine room, knowing perfectly well that no power on earth could save them, choosing to stay there while there was work to be done for the common good, their best hope being presently to be drowned instead of being boiled or scalded to death. All through the ship, though in less awful circumstances, the same spirit was being observed; men who had duties to do went on doing them because they were the kind of men to whom in such an hour it came more easily to perform than to shirk their duties. The three ship’s boys spent the whole of that hour carrying provisions from the store-room to the deck; the post-office employés worked in the flooded mail-room below to save the mail-bags and carry them up to where they might be taken off if there should be a chance; the purser and his men brought up the ship’s books and money, against all possibility of its being any use to do so, but because it was their duty at such a time to do so; the stewards were busy to the end with their domestic, and the officers with their executive, duties. In all this we have an example of spontaneous discipline—for they had never been drilled in doing these things, they only knew that they had to do them—such as no barrack-room discipline in the world could match. In such moments all artificial bonds are useless. It is what men are in themselves that determines their conduct; and discipline and conduct like this are proofs, not of the superiority of one race over another, but that in the core of human nature itself there is an abiding sweetness and soundness that fear cannot embitter nor death corrupt.

The twin gray horses are still at their work in Belfast Lough, and on any summer morning you may see their white manes shining like gold as they escort you in from the sunrise and the open sea to where the smoke rises and the din resounds.

For the iron forest has branched again, and its dreadful groves are echoing anew to the clamour of the hammers and the drills. Another ship, greater and stronger even than the lost one, is rising within the cathedral scaffoldings; and the men who build her, companions of those whom the Titanic spilled into the sea, speak among themselves and say, “this time we shall prevail.”

May 1912.

A TABLE
SHOWING THE LOSS OF LIFE ON THE TITANIC First Class Per cent.   Carried. Saved. Lost. saved. Men 173 58 115 34 Women 144 139 5 97 Children 5 5 0 100 Total 322 202 120 63 Second Class Per cent.   Carried. Saved. Lost. saved. Men 160 13 147 8 Women 93 78 15 84 Children 24 24 0 100 Total 277 115 162 42 Third Class Per cent.   Carried. Saved. Lost. saved. Men 454 55 399 12 Women 179 98 81 55 Children 76 23 53 30 Total 709 176 533 25 Total Passengers Per cent.   Carried. Saved. Lost. saved. Men 787 126 661 16 Women 416 315 101 76 Children 105 52 53 49 Total 1308 493 815 38 Crew Per cent.   Carried. Saved. Lost. saved. Men 875 189 686 22 Women 23 21 2 91 Total 898 210 688 23 Total Passengers and Crew Per cent.   Carried. Saved. Lost. saved. Men 1662 315 1347 19 Women 439 336 103 77 Children 105 52 53 49 Total 2206 703 1503 32