Steele, Wilbur Daniel "The Dark Hour"

World War 1 tale set aboard an unnamed ship in the North Atlantic war “zone,” heading westward to America, “in the dark void between two continents.” Steele’s two characters – a doctor and a patient of his whom the doctor believes to be dying – engage in a dark, somber dialog on the meaning of war, specifically the Great War of which they have personally played a small part. The doctor is clearly despondent, while his grievously wounded patient takes a more positive view and sees “democracy” as the salvation that will arise out of the ashes of World War 1. Of “The Dark Hour,” Edward J. O’Brien in his The Best Short Stories of 1918 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story noted “In its message to the American people it yields in significance only to the best of President Wilson’s state papers.” At story’s end, the patient is still alive as his ship continues her westward journey.

There is a time-added poignancy to the Sept. 1940 Atlantic Monthly republishing of the story. This was the period immediately following the fall of France, the British evacuation at Dunkirk and the beginning of the London Blitz. America was of course still neutral, and Steele’s message of calm optimism in the face of European hostilities was probably meant to reassure a jittery nation. In hindsight that optimism was both unrealistic and misguided. Indeed, by the Autumn of 1940 the very same seas upon which Steele’s doctor and patient had sailed back in 1918 were being transformed anew into the ferocious World War 2 Battle of the Atlantic.