Off to Greece
Crossing the Atlantic turned out to be more arduous than anticipated. Ships were in very short supply as the war took shape, and the team had to sail on the venerable and threadbare S.S. Ioaninna.
S.S. Ioaninna, location and date unknown
Its cabins were so infested with gnawing rats (not a surprise on a ship full of grain) and bedbugs that the Red Cross people resorted to sleeping out on deck. They repeatedly had to repair the holes that rats chewed into their duffel bags. Conditions were likely even worse for the passengers in steerage, who were residents of Greece or the Balkans, and had been caught abroad by the war. Now these desperate folk wanted to return ASAP to their families -- who, ironically, might have already fled their family homes because of epidemic.
The voyage was interrupted several times by British patrol vessels, which dispatched boarding parties to Ioaninna to confirm that she was neither a military vessel in disguise, nor a civilian steamer transporting criminals, spies, or contraband. In Mary Gladwin’s diary, the account of one such visit stands out: an encounter with the 1895-vintage battleship HMS Glory.
HMS Glory; instead of being retired and scrapped, she remained in service,
but was relegated to patrol duty in the West Atlantic
Facing a boarding party of young officers and sailors, Gladwin succeeded in being permitted to speak on behalf of her entire contingent (Does a Monty Python “Don’t talk about the hospital!” sketch come to mind?). She found the young Royal Navy men quite charming, and the very sight of the approaching Glory with its looming guns riding over the Atlantic’s waves had stirred her deeply. As the men of the boarding party later said their goodbyes, she gave them candies to share with their shipmates. That day, Gladwin concluded her diary entry with the happy observation that no word of the project for a new hospital had slipped from her lips.
