These women who write of loves
that are loose,
(Those little perversionist scribes of the Deuce!)
Laughter of lies lilting lewd at their lips,
Their souls and brains both in a maudlin eclipse;
Their bosoms as bare as their stories and songs;
These coaxers of dogs with their “rights” and their wrongs.
Strike from their shoulders
the transparent mesh;
Mark the Red Cross on the cloth for their flesh.
Ye, men who seem women in
work and at play;
Ye, who do blindly as women may say;
Ye, who kill life in the smug cabarets;
Ye, all, at the beck of the little tea-tray;
Ye, all, of the measure of daughters of clay.
Waken to face me: be
women no more;
But fellow-men born, from top branch to the core;
Men who must fight—who can kill, who can die,
While women once more shall be covered and shy.
Hoch der Kaiser! Amen! Amen! We of the hills and the homes; We of the plows and the tomes; Hail to the Caesar who’s given us men Our rightful heritage back again.
[From The London Times, Jan. 16, 1915.]
The earliest description of a practical under-water boat is given by William Bourne in his book entitled “Inventions or Devices,” published in 1578. Instructions for building such a boat are given in detail, and it has been conjectured that Cornelius van Drebbel, a Dutch physician, used this information for the construction of the vessel with which in the early part of the seventeenth century he carried out some experiments on the Thames. It is doubtful, however, whether van Drebbel’s boat was ever entirely submerged, and the voyage with which he was credited, from Westminster to Greenwich, is supposed to have been made in an awash condition, with the head of the inventor above the surface. More than one writer at the time referred to van Drebbel’s boat and endeavored to explain the apparatus by which his rowers were enabled to breathe under water.
Van Drebbel died in 1634, and no illustration of his boat has been discovered. Nineteen years later the vessel illustrated here was constructed at Rotterdam from the designs of a Frenchman named de Son. This is supposed to be the earliest illustration of any submarine, and the inscription under the drawing, which was printed at Amsterdam in the Calverstraat, (in the Three Crabs,) is in old Dutch, of which the following is a translation:
The inventor of this ship will undertake to destroy in a single day a hundred vessels, and such destruction could not be prevented by fire, storm, bad weather, or the force of the waves, saving only that the Almighty should otherwise will it.
[Illustration: The figures on the drawing refer to the following explanations: