inoculated bodies, the stench of sick horses

Marcel Ponty, travel poster (c1925)

Maurice Browne, Too Late to Lament: An autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956, pp. 50-51. This is his eyewitness description of what it was like to be a British soldier aboard a troop ship, sailing to South Africa, during the Boer War in 1899. If this isn’t vivid enough, imagine later experiences of American soldiers on World War I troop ships, as they were being transported to France (c1918), stricken by mal de mer (seasickness) and the equivalent then of COVID-19, called Spanish flu—

A rolling, pitching ship; packed hammocks; beasts held upright by the sides of their narrow stalls; the stench of horses sick at both ends; on decks slippery with fifith, vomiting men leading voiding horses; a beast falling, a broken leg, a shot: another carcass heaved overboard; aching bodies, inoculated for typhoid, strewn about the deck; hard-bitten faces at poker round a barrel: “Keep out of this, young Browne—it’s no game for children”; the stillness of tropic seas; long glamorous days; endless blue; uproar amid endless hush.

Donfé Ca-Choo | Book Collage

Roy R. Behrens©, Donfé Ca-Choo (1997). Book collage. Collection of Luther College.

Mal de Mer

Oliver Percy Bernard (1881-1939) was an odd bird—at very least—albeit he called himself "Bunny." An Art Deco-era architectural, furniture and scenic designer, he was profoundly deaf, conspicuously short, large-headed, and splenetic. He was, in the words of his former secretary, "amusing, utterly impossible, kind, and a bully" (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Other distinctions include his having survived the sinking of the Lusitania (although completely unable to swim), as well as extended service as a British camouflage artist (or camoufleur) during World War I (he worked directly with Solomon J. Solomon and André Mare, among others), an experience he later described in a wonderfully readable memoir called Cock Sparrow [his wartime nickname] (London: Jonathan Cape: 1935). There are remarkable passages on nearly every page of that autobiography, including this description of the most dreadful seasickness in his godawful days as a deck boy—

…Sickened each day by revolting food, becoming more and more nauseated every night on lookout at the fo'c'sle head, Bunny gradually starved and finally collapsed; after two days helpless in his bunk, he was hauled out by the captain, who put a broom in his hands with which he had scarcely strength to balance himself on his feet. So, after four voyages across the Atlantic without digestive embarrassment, he now experienced genuine mal de mer, without attention of stewards, under conditions that would kill a good many "saloon" sailors. Clinging feebly to a deck broom, bewildered, starving for some of that affection without which daily bread the soul is famished, through eyes of despair he gazed at just such a coast as tortured Ulysses in his bonds; it was the coast of Cornwall and Devon, so near and unmistakably so far from a floating slum under foreign flag. Tottering into the captain's cabin, scarcely above a whisper he begged to be put ashore. Captain Knudsen harshly inquired, "And who will take you that way, unless you swim?" (pp. 52-53)