The Lusitania

The Lusitania steamed into its last sunrise. And we all steamed with it. I slept only a little after leaving Selene Bourgani. I rose and I wrote some and I packed my things and I ate lunch, with the ship orchestra playing “The Blue Danube,” and I went down to the Purser’s Bureau in the Entrance Hall on B Deck and I retrieved the constant hidden companion of every foreign excursion of my war-correspondent career: my money belt, with a stash of gold coins and with reporter credentials and a passport protected inside, for hot countries and cold, for wet countries and dry, for mountain battlefields and city back alleys.