Mary Roberts Rinehart, before she left the US for London & Europe, 1915
"There was no particular difficulty about getting out of the country, except the pang of leaving the family...I had the usual telegrams, baskets of fruit, boxes of flowers, but I also had a new thing, one I had never taken before. This was an entire suit of rubber, which in case the ship was torpedoed one was first to don and then to inflate through a tube.
And so and in this manner did I sail on the old Franconia early in January of 1915, the Franconia which was later to be torpedoed and sunk somewhere, I think, in the Mediterranean. We had no escort as we left the harbor, and although the ports in the cabins were closed and smoking or the lighting of matches was forbidden on deck at night, no other precautions were taken.
I was a little frightened that night, when the dark came down. I was alone, and I knew nobody on the ship. It was one thing to plan the great adventure, and another to go through with it. And I had never left the boys before, expect for a few days. I lay awake, worrying about them, about my desertion, and once again about my headstrong determination to do the thing I wanted to do, regardless of the cost.
That first night was endless. The port was closed and covered with cardboard, to prevent any light being seen by a submarine. There was hush of silence all over the ship. And with every beat of the engines I was increasing the distance between me and mine. I lay in my narrow berth and faced what I was doing. I was not afraid of the war; I can at least say for myself that, if I often lacked moral courage, I have a certain amount of physical bravery. But it is the courage of the imaginative individual who seems not only the event itself, but all the possible results of that event."
Excerpt from pages 149-150 of My Story by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Her trip is also the subject of a chapter in Women Heroes of World War I.
