The Yanks Are Starving by Glen Craney

Author:Glen Craney [Craney, Glen;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: bonus army, great depression, world war one, doughboys, douglas macarthur, herbert hoover, floyd gibbons, walter w. waters, joe angelo, george patton, march on washington, bonus march, pelham glassford, harlem hellfighters
ISBN: 9780981648453
Publisher: Brigid's Fire Press
Published: 2014-04-15T07:00:00+00:00

A HALF HOUR LATER, ANNA, sitting near the hearth in the reading room for light, was startled from her study of the Martyr’s Mirror by a sounding of the warning whistle from the stern.

The sentry she had passed earlier that night came running down the hall toward the dining lounge. “Overboard!” he shouted. “Overboard!

Her limbs went cold with fear.

She rushed back down the hall and up the stairwell, then hurried as fast as she could down the promenade deck toward the stern. The sailors were hovering over the rail with their telescope glasses, searching the foam being churned up by the propellers. The other passengers climbed up from the stairwells to see why the warning whistle had been blasted.

She hurried to a crewman. “What happened?”

“The two ladies jumped.”

She ran to the railing and frantically searched the black waves. The ship was moving so fast that she could no longer see the lights from the port now. The deck was a pandemonium of panic as a crewman rushed to the forecastle to inform the captain of the overboards.

The captain came marching toward the stern. “Did anybody see them?”

“I spoke to them only twenty minutes ago,” Anna said. “They said their names were Gladys and Dorothea.”

A groan swept the huddled passengers, and the captain narrowed his gaze to search the ship’s churning wake.

One of the crew asked him, “Should we turn it around, sir?”

The captain shook his head and kept staring off toward the east.

Anna finally managed to find her voice again. “Who were they?”

The captain seemed astonished by her question. “The Cromwell twins. I thought everybody on board knew them.”

Before she could ask him why, he hurried off, shouting orders to his officers to keep on the westbound course, leaving the overboards to their fate.

A male passenger next to her lit a cigarette and offered it to her, but she refused it. Seeing her so shaken, he explained the captain’s decision. “We’ve been running at eighteen knots. We’re five miles away from the spot they’d be. Even if we went back, there’s no way we could find them in time.”

She pressed a fist to her mouth. Could she have prevented them from jumping? Why had she not detected the desperation in their voices? Had she become so familiar with death that it now seemed normal? Blind with grief, she whispered, “They seemed so gentle.”

The man nodded. “Damn shame. They were the daughters of Fredrick Cromwell, the industrialist. They had a fortune waiting for them in New York.” He took another puff from the cigarette and shrugged. “I suppose any one of us on this ship might have done the same thing. Hell of a world.” He crushed the cigarette under his heel and walked back to the lounge.

Left alone on the stern, Anna collapsed, sobbing, to the tarp roll. As she leaned against the bridge, she looked down and saw Gladys’s journal abandoned behind the tarp. Had the twin sister hidden it in the crease there? She pulled the notebook out.

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