But when, on the third day, we came on deck the news was written
against the sky. Swinging from the funnels, sailors were painting out
the scarlet-and-black colors of the Cunard line and substituting a
mouse-like gray. Overnight we had passed into the hands of the
admiralty, and the Lusitania had emerged a cruiser. That to possible
German war-ships she might not disclose her position, she sent no
wireless messages. But she could receive them; and at breakfast in
the ship's newspaper appeared those she had overnight snatched
from the air. Among them, without a scare-head, in the most modest
of type, we read: "England and Germany have declared war." Seldom
has news so momentous been conveyed so simply or, by the
Englishmen on board, more calmly accepted. For any exhibition they
gave of excitement or concern, the news the radio brought them
might have been the result of a by-election.

Later in the morning they gave us another exhibition of that
repression of feeling, of that disdain of hysteria, that is a national
characteristic, and is what Mr. Kipling meant when he wrote: "But oh,
beware my country, when my country grows polite!"

Word came that in the North Sea the English war-ships had
destroyed the German fleet. To celebrate this battle which, were the
news authentic, would rank with Trafalgar and might mean the end of
the war, one of the ship's officers exploded a detonating bomb.
Nothing else exploded. Whatever feelings of satisfaction our English
cousins experienced they concealed.

Under like circumstances, on an American ship, we would have tied
down the siren, sung the doxology, and broken everything on the bar.