The End is the Beginning - Chapter 5

09/02/2026

Homer Olsen took a deep breath, but the air just hissed into his helmet, barely giving him a taste.

Pressing his chin against the push-to-talk button, he shouted, “Topside! I can’t breathe!”

“Come up, Olsen,” Chief Barnes barked through the tinny speaker in the brass helmet.

“I’ve got to finish this,” Olsen replied sharply. “I need to tighten the thru-hull fitting.”

“Do it quick. We’ve got glorious news! The war is over!”

Olsen dropped his wrench. With a muttered curse, he said, “What are you talking about, Chief?”

“They’ve declared an armistice! It’s over!”

“That’s great news, Chief, but tell those tenders to keep pumping. I don’t want to die down here ’cause they’re celebrating!”

Despite his admonition to the chief, joy coursed through Olsen as he fumbled for the wrench attached to a string on his belt. His fingers found the handle, and he went back to work, blindly turning the wrenches in the silt-stained water beneath a scout cruiser. His wrench kept slipping off the fitting, rapping his knuckles against the barnacle-encrusted hull.

Once more, he fitted the wrench and torqued down, feeling the nuts grind together and then stop tight. He gave the nuts one more tug and let the wrenches drop to the ends of their strings. Olsen shook out his hands, frozen from the chilly water coursing down the Loire River.

It took longer than he wanted to get out of the diving dress once the tenders hulled him onto the barge. All around him, men cheered and danced. The crew had broken out a bottle and were passing it around. Chief Barnes had a big stogie clamped between his teeth. Olsen took a swig of the wine and spat it out immediately. No celebration was worth hot wine.

After stowing all the gear, Commander Quinn was the last man out of the warehouse. He carefully locked the door and pocketed the key.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said to Chief Barnes, Homer Olsen, and Archie Rollins. “It seems this is the end. The Navy plans to disband our merry group of adventurers before we return home.”

“How soon will that be?” Rollins asked.

“Rumor has it that the Navy has been gearing up for demobilization since October, when they started working on the armistice,” Quinn replied. “But no one knew exactly when the Huns would sign.”

“How do you know all this?” Rollins asked.

Quinn flicked his silver oak leaf on his collar.

“Well, should we join the celebration?” the chief asked.

“When in Saint-Nazarie, do as the French,” Quinn replied.

The men stepped out to their favorite pub and found most of the diving crew there. A brass hard hat hung on the wall above the bar, donated when it could no longer be fixed. The team stayed drunk for days, seeming to follow the lead of the entire military.

More troops arrived in Saint-Nazarie, streaming in from all points across the front. The Navy brought in troop ships to take home first the wounded and then those who had been overseas the longest.

Olsen walked through the streets, pushing through crowds of men. Haggard faces stared back, some with thousand-yard stares from months of being shelled along the Hindenburg Line. He arrived at the diving warehouse and found Quinn and Chief Barnes.

“I just got word,” Quinn said. “We’ll be here until all the troops get off. The Navy wants us to stand by to repair ships and clear the waterway.”

Olsen grinned. “I like the sound of that. Beats going back to Texas.”

He wasn’t looking forward to going home. Olsen had gotten a taste of adventure and craved more. He wanted to keep diving so much that he’d been up and down the waterfront, lobbying for a job with one of the contract companies.

While the contractors liked that Olsen was an experienced diver, each said they didn’t know what would happen after the drawdown. Most contractors depended on the war effort to keep their books in the black, and a glut of new divers would be looking for jobs when they returned home. And word filtering back from the States was that jobs were scarce anyway.

 “I can’t picture you as a cowboy,” Quinn said with a laugh.

“It ain’t hard, Commander,” Barnes stated. “Just put a ten-gallon hat on him.”

“Well, pardner, we better round ’em up and head ’em out,” Quinn joked.

The men loaded gear onto their salvage barge, collecting the half-drunken tenders and pumpers to move upriver toward a partially sunken pier. As the tug pulled them along, Olsen stood at the rail. Massive tent camps had sprung up overnight. Troops waved to them as they sat along the muddy banks, wrapped in heavy winter coats. Their cigarette smoke blended with the smoke from campfires used for cooking and warmth.

The tug anchored with the barge between it and the old pier. Twisted pilings stubbed out of the roiling water with rotten planks and submerged cross beams tying everything together.

Olsen wore a thick woolen suit beneath his dungarees, but the clothing did little to cut the bite of the freezing wind as it blasted down the Loire. He dressed quickly in the canvas diving suit and within ten minutes, the tenders had the helmet bolted on. Olsen stood and waddled to the ladder.

On the bottom, Olsen listened as Barnes directed him toward the first piling, a thick concrete-and-wood structure that he could barely fit his arms around as he tied off a line. The current buffeted his suit, tugging at the canvas and brass as he knelt in the mud. Olsen sheltered behind the piling, using the line to hold himself in place as he hefted the pneumatic drill. The rudimentary tool allowed him to bore a hole into the concrete, but it was slow going. The drill vibrated in his hands, turning them even numb as the cold seeped through the diving suit.

Slowly, the drill bored deep into the piling. Once he’d finished the first hole, he moved to the next with Barnes directing him by watching the explosion of exhaust bubbles on the surface.

After boring six holes, Barnes recalled his diver. Olsen went up the ladder without a decompression stop, having only been twenty feet under. Rollins went over the rail as Olsen’s tenders undressed him. They removed everything but the suit and the heavy brass collar, leaving them on for his next dive.

Olsen crossed the barge to the little shack built at the rear. A cook had a pot of strong coffee boiling, and he poured Olsen a cup as the diver huddled near the stove for warmth.

“How’s the drill?” Quinn asked. They’d borrowed it from T.A. Scott Company, a salvage and construction contractor building a new quay just downriver.

“Works great. It’s better than beating a hole with a chisel.”

Another diver, Charles Vonn, took Rollins’ place, and Olsen went down for his second dive after that. He bored the final holes in the pilings just above the mudline. Once he came up, Rollins went back down, carrying gun-cotton charges he would fit into the freshly bored holes. Vonn linked all the charges with det cord. Once Vonn was on deck, Quinn ordered the barge to back off the pilings.

Soldiers watched from the bank, having nothing better to do now that they weren’t killing the Hun. Quinn called through a bullhorn, ordering them to stand back before counting down from five.

Chief Barnes depressed the plunger, and a chain of explosions rippled beneath the water’s surface, blowing geysers of white water and chunks of concrete and wood into the air.

Like the underwater explosion, the elation of the Armistice burned out fast.

What replaced it was mud, freezing rain, and the same brutal labor, just without the bullets flying.

The work was dangerous, repetitive, and exhausting. The cold never let up—on the surface or in the Loire. The Navy kept them on anyway. The Loire had to stay open so the big troopships could haul the boys home.

Day after day they worked the river. Olsen would suit up in the biting wind, the canvas diving dress stiff with salt and oil. The tenders would bolt the heavy helmet down, and the world would shrink to the roar of air and the dim yellow circle of his faceplate.

But Olsen found something in it that he couldn’t explain. The weight of the suit. The hiss of air. The strange quiet of the river bottom. It felt more real than anything he’d known before the war, and far more real than whatever awaited him on a dusty ranch in Texas.

In late May, Quinn told the crew to pack up the gear for shipment home.

“What about us?” one of the pump tenders asked during a meeting in the warehouse.

“You’ll have orders for you to return home on the next wave of ships.”

Cheers broke out from the assembled men. Rollins and Olsen grinned at each other. They were ready to move on.

As the crew packed the pumps, suits, and other gear into containers, Quinn pulled Olsen and Rollins away from the unit.

Outside, he lit a cigarette. Olsen glanced up and down the quay. Grass sprouted from cracks in the concrete and glistened in the sun along the riverbanks. The temperatures hovered in the sixties during the day, making life tolerable along the miserable waterfront. Giant troop ships lined the wharves with soldiers crawling up the gangways like ants to a sugar cube. Across the river, a destroyer belched black smoke from its funnels.

“I can have your orders amended,” Quinn said.

“How so?” Olsen asked.

“You can be discharged here instead of Stateside.”

“Why would we do that?” Rollins asked.

Barnes stepped through the door to join them.

Quinn ashed his cigarette. “Barnes and I are going to the East Indies. There’s diving work there: pearls and salvage.”

Olsen’s ears perked up.

“Come with us, boys,” Barnes said, clapping the men on their shoulders. “Water’s warm as piss, clear as gin, and pearl beds that stretch for miles. Not to mention the beautiful lassies we’ll find along the way.”

“Are you trying to talk me out of it?” Olsen asked. This was the answer to his dilemma. And a new adventure in an exotic port sounded better than any other option.

“Then it’s agreed,” Quinn said. “We’ll head for Singapore.”

© 2026 Evan Graver