Chapter XXIII: On Board the 3-U-9

Philip Street was a tall, dark complexioned lad of eighteen, rather serious looking, but with a pleasant if infrequent smile. His companion, Harry Corwin, was of like age, although his rounder, good-humoured countenance suggested a disparity in Phil’s favour. They had eaten their first meal in nearly sixty hours and showed an inclination to go to sleep, and it was only by resolute efforts that they kept their eyes open and told their tale. Phil was spokesman, but Harry, prodded into wakefulness at intervals by Steve’s elbow, threw in occasional interpolations or corrections. Here is the story as they told it.

“We’ve been over and back four times,” said Phil. “Twice on the _Lake City_, a Huron coal steamer, once on the _North Easton_――――”

“The Huns got her off Belle Isle in July,” interjected Harry. “We never had a chance with the gun. One moldie did for us.”

“Then we were assigned to the _Arapahoe_. She was a small affair, but mighty seaworthy and a comfortable ship, take her all around. We went over and back on her last month, Philadelphia to Plymouth, and never saw so much as a periscope. It was rather deadly. This time we had copper and steel rails and I heard that the insurance on our cargo was something like three hundred thousand dollars, so you can see that when the Huns got her they got something worth while. Well, we were due in Plymouth tomorrow and were about four hundred miles off――forty-eight–thirty north and twelve–twenty west――when the trouble began. It was just at sun-up. I was off duty when we got the alarm, which was in the shape of a bunch of bursting shrapnel about the top of our forward stack. Someone came down yelling ‘Submarine!’ and there was a lot of goings-on for about a minute. I piled out in what I had on, which wasn’t much, and added a life-preserver. When I got on deck there was Harry training the bow gun on every point of the compass and saying things that weren’t nice to hear from the lips of innocence.”

“So would you have,” grumbled Harry. “There they were shooting shrapnel at us every forty seconds and not a thing in sight!”

“What do you mean, nothing in sight?” demanded Joe.

“True as true, Joey. They were squarely between us and the sun, which was just half out of the ocean, do you see, and you couldn’t catch even a glimpse of them.”

“But we caught something else,” said Phil grimly. “Never tell me those Germans can’t shoot. They hit us somewhere about every puff of their gun, a four-inch it proved to be later. We were fairly peppered, and there was no come back. We couldn’t see them a little bit. Of course we knew where the shots came from and we aimed in a general way at the sun and tried various elevations. But you might as well hope to hit a――hit a――――”

“Of course you might,” agreed Steve. “Then what?”

“They got Atkins, one of our gun crew, and two of the sailors. And they wounded about eight others. They kept it up a good fifteen minutes before we saw the folly of staying around there. The captain was crazy mad and kept shouting to us to ‘do something’ and swearing at us most――ah――reprehensibly.” Harry chuckled. “So we cut away two life-boats and abandoned the ship. We didn’t want to, I can tell you. In fact, the gun crews pretty nearly mutinied. But, after all, the captain was right. You couldn’t do anything as long as that sub stayed right square in the eye of the sun, and there wasn’t any use waiting for the sun to get out of the way, because they were making about every shot a bullseye and by the time the sun had got up out of our way we wouldn’t have been there much! So we got off in two boats, thirty-two of us in all, leaving three dead aboard. Our boat was the first away and the first officer sent us off to lie by out of range. Somebody stopped to get the ship’s dog and the second boat was five minutes later than we were, I guess. Most everyone of any consequence was in her, including the officers and the rest of the two gun crews. Just what happened I don’t quite know, for we had pulled a half-mile away, but it looked as if a shell came through the hull and went plump into that life-boat on the further side. Our engines were banged to bits by then and the _Arapahoe_ was drifting side on to the sub. We rowed back as quick as we could and picked up two men, a sailor and a stoker. That was all that ever showed up, although we laid around two or three minutes. The sub was still pegging away, just as though they were having target practice. The stoker died about half an hour afterward. He’d got a piece of shrapnel in his lung.”

“Were any of the officers in your boat, Phil?” asked Joe.

“Not one. The second mate was supposed to come off with us, but he didn’t.”

“Phil was in command of that life-boat,” said Harry, “and you want to believe he filled the bill, too.”

“How’d you get your glad rags on?” inquired Steve. “Go back for them?”

“I did,” said Phil. “Harry was dressed and on watch at the time. I thought I might as well have something on besides a life-preserver, which isn’t very warm. Well, we started off finally and pulled eastward, partly to keep out of the way of the sub and partly with the notion of making the French coast. We’d rowed about an hour, I suppose, and were thanking our lucky stars that we’d got off when suddenly there was a commotion and we saw that confounded U-boat coming straight for us. She was about three-quarters of a mile away, well out of water and doing about sixteen knots. As she came nearer we could see about a dozen men on her deck. There wasn’t any use in trying to run away, so we took it easy and waited. She proved to be one of the smaller class, about two hundred feet over all, but she looked brand new and had ‘3-U-9’ on her hull. There was a four-inch forward and a four-seven aft.”

“Nice guns they were, too,” said Harry sleepily. “Awfully――awfully _intelligent_ looking beasties!”

“‘Who is captain?’ shouts a voice on the sub. I called back that the captain was not there. The sub ran up close to us and stopped and we saw that three of the men on the deck were officers: captain, lieutenant and a junior. The rest were seamen and gunners, I guess. Smart appearing they were, too. Lots of gold braid on the officers, and their uniforms looked as though they’d just been pressed. Maybe they had. Anyway, they had about everything you could think of on that sub, and if there wasn’t an electrical clothes-presser it isn’t my fault.”

“Did you go aboard her?” asked Steve eagerly.

“Yes. Wait a bit. I’m coming to it in my own peculiar way. Gee, but I am sleepy, fellows!” Phil yawned and stretched. “The captain refused to believe we weren’t hiding our officers somewhere for awhile, and when we’d convinced him he asked who was in charge and someone said I was. ‘Stand up,’ he shouted. I stood up. Then he pointed to Harry. ‘You stand up, too!’ So Harry stood up.”

“I stood up so quick,” chuckled Harry, “that I almost fell overboard.”

“It’s lucky you understood German and knew what he was saying to you,” said Joe.

“German nothing! He spoke as good English as you or I. He told Harry and me to come aboard. The rest were to stay in the boat and help get salvage from the steamer. We went onto the deck of the sub and four or five men and the junior officer got into the life-boat and pulled back to the _Arapahoe_. The captain, first lieutenant, Harry and I went below, all quite sociable and polite, although I wanted terribly to bash that captain in the eye! Down there he asked us a bunch of questions. First of all wanted to know our branch of the service. Guess the Reserve uniform had him beat. He seemed kind of annoyed when he found we weren’t officers, and I was afraid for a minute that he would shoot us or something. But he got over it and he and the luff, who didn’t talk the lingo, growled at each other in German. Then he asked the name of the steamer, what her tonnage was, who owned her and when and where she was built. I told him all I knew, which wasn’t so much, and blessed if he didn’t check me off in a Lloyd’s register! And afterwards, when they brought back the ship’s papers――or some of them, anyway――with the first load in the life-boat he checked off again. ‘You see,’ he said, sort of grinning, ‘we get a bonus for tonnage over a certain amount that we sink, so it pays us to be accurate.’ What do you think of that? Aren’t they the――the――――”

“S-sh,” said Harry soothingly. “You’ve said it all twenty times, Phil. It always excites you, you know.”

“It surely does! Well, when he said that I couldn’t help asking him if he’d had much luck. ‘Oh, several hundred thousand tons so far,’ he said, ‘and we’re still on our first month of duty. We take three months at a time.’ ‘Huh,’ said Harry, ‘it’s pretty profitable, isn’t it, so long as you don’t get caught!’ Well, the captain didn’t like that very much and he looked ugly for a minute. He growled something to the luff and then they both went topside again, leaving us down there with a sailor and a couple of mechanics. I’d noticed right along that the sailor was dying to speak and so, as soon as the officers were gone, he burst out:

“‘Profitable, eh?’ he said, pulling out a roll of bills. ‘Throw your eyes over that, feller. Some roll, eh?’ Well, it was. There must have been three or four thousand dollars of all kinds of money in that wad. ‘Are you German?’ asked Harry. ‘Sure, but I lived in America fourteen years. I was an American citizen, too, feller: mate in the coastwise trade. When war broke out I beat it home. There’s another feller here just like me, good American citizen.’ He grinned and I wanted to punch his ugly face for him. I wanted to ask him what sort of an American citizen he considered himself, but I thought it was just as well not to. I had to kick Harry’s shins to keep him from saying something to get us in wrong.”

“I hope some day I’ll come across that chap again,” said Harry, wistfully. “Sometime when he hasn’t got his gang with him!”

“So do I,” said Phil. “He couldn’t seem to understand why the United States had entered the war and asked us to explain it to him. But what was the use? He wouldn’t have understood if we’d drawn him a diagram and thrown pictures on the screen! So we said we guessed it was principally to lick Germany. That didn’t seem to bother him a bit, for he just laughed and winked, and said, ‘Well, I should worry. We’ll have the lot of you licked in six months. Isn’t that what you think?’ I told him I guessed about three years more of it was coming, and he looked as though he thought I was crazy. ‘Gee whiz!’ he said. ‘Three years! You’re just talking, aren’t you?’ We said no, and he looked a bit serious for a minute. Then he shrugged and said: ‘Well, I’ve been submarining two years and I’ve had them go down under me, so I guess I’ll worry through all right. But this three year business is new stuff to me. And I hope you’re wrong. I’m dead sick of it, in spite of the good money.’

“‘How did you escape drowning when your submarine went down?’ Harry asked him. So he pulled his coat open and showed us a life-belt underneath. It was deflated, but he said it only took a minute to blow it up, and he made fun of our bulky ones. Then he invited us to have a look over the boat and you can bet we were ready to. They had ten torpedoes in sight forward, small fourteen-inch ones they were, and a bunch of shells big enough to sink the British Navy. And then the instruments strewn around the bunks! Everyone seemed to have a passion for sextants and chronometers. I suppose they’d swiped them off various ships they’d sunk, and Harry guessed they were keeping them on account of brass being worth so much in Germany. Anyway, they had about a thousand dollars’ worth of truck lying around loose. There were about thirty men in the crew, I think, and all looked pretty fit. I asked that ‘American citizen’ if submarine work didn’t get on the nerves and he said it didn’t. ‘Still,’ he added, ‘only a fool would pick a job on a submarine. We can’t help ourselves. We don’t have any say in the matter. I don’t mind it much, though.’ He took us all over the boat and explained everything beautifully. On the captain’s desk was the chart and I said that it didn’t look much different from any other ship’s chart.

“‘It isn’t,’ he said, ‘only we take our position every four hours.’ He spread it out for us and traced the sub’s course from Kiel into the North Sea and down around the Shetlands, past Ireland and into the transatlantic lanes. ‘Here’s where we are now,’ he said, pointing, ‘and here’s our North Atlantic ocean base.’ And blowed if he didn’t point out the very spot, or what he said was the very spot! Maybe he was lying. It looked to me about eighty or ninety miles northwest of where we were lying then. I told your captain and he made a note of it, but he didn’t say whether he took any stock in the yarn or not. The Huns are such frightful liars that they’ll have to show me. Anyway, this crook said that they have big cargo subs, like the _Deutschland_ that came over to see us once, lying at these ocean bases filled with oil and ammunition and supplies of all sorts. Every so often, or whenever necessary, I suppose, the subs make for a base and a mother boat and put off their sick men, give up their loot and take on fresh supplies. That’s how they can stay out for three months at a stretch sometimes.”

“Do you believe it?” asked Joe doubtfully.

Phil shook his head. “I believe some of it. I believe that what that thug told us was what they did in theory, but I don’t believe that it works out in practice.”

“Pipe-dream,” grunted Harry. “I wanted to tell him so. There was a bunch of things I wanted to tell that guy. The one thing I’m living for now is to run across him some day on some nice quiet street back home. If I ever do I hope I’ll have a United States flag with me.”

“What for?” asked Joe.

“So I can stuff it down his throat.”

“Why soil the flag?” inquired Phil gently. “Well, if I don’t finish this yarn I’ll go to sleep, fellows. Say, this packet of yours sort of rolls, don’t she?”

“Oh, in a sea she does. She’s steady enough today,” replied Steve.

“Is she? You call this steady? My head’s aching from wobbling back and forth.”

“I should think you’d call her the _Parker House_ instead of the _Warren_,” suggested Harry, with a sort of ask-me-why intonation.

“I get you,” said Steve. “On account of the rolls. Give him a good heave, fellows, so the propellers won’t chop him!”

“They made four trips in all,” Phil went on, “and they cleaned the _Arapahoe_ to the bone.”

“Five trips,” corrected Harry. “The last time the boat came back she was so low in the water that I never thought she’d make the sub!”

“They had the captain’s papers from the safe in his cabin, his sextants, chronometers, watch, clothes and, probably, money. They even carried off the photographs on the cabin wall. They swiped every mattress they could find, and every blanket and sheet and pillow. They had all the cooking things and enough brass and copper fittings to sink the sub. I suppose they would have taken the cargo if they could have stored it anywhere.”

“They took a bag of dog biscuits, too,” said Harry. “I’ll bet they didn’t know what they were. Bet you the captain’s munching on ’em this minute.”

“Mighty suitable chuck for him, I’d say,” observed Joe.

“You’re dead right. Anyway, I’ve got to hand it to those Huns for salvaging. They’ve got a gang of Italian house-wreckers beaten at their own game. What I suspect is that when the war’s over and there aren’t any more murders to be done they’ll all reform and become burglars and safe-breakers! Well, they brought us up on deck again when they’d finished their neat little job and I give you my word there wasn’t room to set your foot because of the junk they had strewn over it! They told us to go back into the life-boat. Just as we were stepping in one of our men, a stoker named Hogan, saw a can of beef lying within reach on the sub’s deck and made a snatch at it, thinking he could get away with it. You see, we had only hard-tack and water in the boat, and that beef would have come in handy. But the junior luff saw him and snarled like a tiger. He had a hatchet in his hand that he’d been slashing things up with on the steamer and he came down on Hogan’s hand with it. That’s how Hogan hasn’t any fingers to speak of on that hand now. The hatchet wasn’t very sharp, but it did the business.”

“Gee!” muttered Steve.

“We pulled off then and they waved good-bye to us, some of the crew did, and Harry got fresh and shook his fist.”

“Yes, and Phil wanted to yard-arm me. He couldn’t do that because we had no yards, so he cut me out of my allowance of grub all day, the brute!”

“You deserved to be pitched overboard,” said Phil, grimly. “It was a fool thing to do, Harry. If they’d seen it and resented it it’s a fair bet they’d have put a shell through the boat. Your little kid-trick put all our lives in danger, and you got off easy when you missed out on two meals.”

“All right. Don’t rub it in. It _was_ a crazy thing to do, but I was so blamed mad――――”

“There are times when you can’t afford to be mad,” said Phil. “We rowed all that day and all last night. It was pretty cold after sun-down. Yesterday afternoon we passed through a regular sea of wreckage: empty boats, life-belts, rigging, barrels, tubs――all sorts of stuff. I suppose a sub had been having a pleasant strafe thereabouts. Just before dark we struck through an oil pool as big as the Polo Grounds. I guess they’d got a tanker there not very long ago. Well, that’s our yarn. To say that we were slightly tickled when we caught sight of your smoke this morning is hardly necessary. But you kept altering your course every little while and we were awfully afraid you wouldn’t spot us.”

“Did they sink the _Arapahoe_?” asked Steve.

“I guess so. One of the men said they placed time-bombs on her, but I can’t say. I know they were still firing at her the last we heard. They must have ammunition to burn, those chaps.”

“Well, it’s the strangest thing,” said Joe, “you fellows turning up like this out in the middle of the ocean! I couldn’t believe my eyes when I caught sight of Phil coming aboard.”

“Lots of queer things are happening these days,” responded Harry philosophically. “Nothing surprises me any more. After you’ve woke up at four G. M. and found yourself floating out of your bunk in the dark, as I did on the old _North Easton_, you――you sort of lose your ability to be surprised.”

“Was she torpedoed?” inquired Steve.

“She was. Shut up, Phil. This is my story. You’ve done all the talking so far, and now it’s my turn. We were off Belle Isle, on our way to Nantes with a cargo of supplies for the Engineers: knocked-down houses and steam engines and a lot of truck. It was fine weather all the way, and we had only had about six U-boat scares, which was quite peaceful in those days. It was July, you know: the fifth, I think. No, the sixth, because we’d celebrated the Fourth two days before by knocking the tar out of a deck hatch that we took for a submarine. Both Phil and I were off duty. It was dark, not pitch dark, you know, but that sort of――seven-eighths dark that is worse to see in. There wasn’t any warning at all, we heard afterwards. The first thing anyone knew there was a muffled sound alongside, a spout of water went up above the deck and that was all. Then the pesky thing went off inside us and _that_ was some noise. She got us square in the engines and there was a fine exhibition of escaping steam and water. I did the deck in one and four-fifths seconds, closely pursued by Phil and a couple of dozen others. The old hooker was already going down, stern first, and as there wasn’t a boat where there should have been one――the torpedo stove in three at once――we took headers into the water. My life-belt got down around my legs and I nearly drowned before I could pull it off and put it where it belonged. A lot of us swam around and watched the ship sink and waited to be picked up by the other transport. There were two of us and two destroyers. It was one of the destroyers who fished us out, because the transports have orders to mind their own business and beat it for safety.

“Finally I got into a boat that was bobbing around about half-full and we all watched the old ship plunge. One thrilling thing was the exhibition of climbing and diving given by Neilsen, one of our lookouts. Neilsen was in the foremast cross-trees when the moldie struck and there wasn’t time to climb down. So as the ship sank and the bow came up higher and higher Neilsen kept on climbing. Finally the ship was standing almost straight up, about two-thirds submerged, and that foremast was almost parallel with the surface. And there was Neilsen, as cool as you like, perched on the mast with one hand steadying himself on a rope. Just as the water poured into the smokestacks Neilsen gathered himself together and made as pretty a high dive as I ever saw. He had to get distance, too, you see, to keep from being dragged under, and he did it. Swear to goodness, fellows, he made thirty yards straight out and struck the water head-first at a mile a minute! We got him when he came up and pulled him out.”

“And what were you doing, Phil?” Joe asked.

“Just swimming around,” said Phil, smiling reminiscently. “The water wasn’t bad. I went over on the other side from Harry and swam so far off to keep from being drawn under with the ship that I had about given up hope of being found when someone ran a boat-hook through the shoulder of my best pair of pajamas and pulled me into a whaleboat.”

“The silly idiot was almost drowned when they got him,” said Harry. “Fact is, I thought he had been. I went all over the destroyer looking for him and couldn’t find him anywhere. They’d dumped him down on deck, thinking he was all right, and I found him rolling around and trying to butt a torpedo tube overboard and oozing salt water.”

“Did they find the U-boat?” asked Steve.

“Never even saw it. Did a lot of firing and dropped some depth bombs, but there was nothing doing. They landed us in Nantes the next day――or that day, it was――at noon.”

“Well,” said Joe, “I don’t see but what you fellows have seen a bit of life since you joined up.”

“Why, yes, that’s so, Joey. And we expect to see more before we’re through, don’t we, Phil? Hello, the beggar’s sound asleep! And I’m going to be in a minute.”

“Come down and pile into my bunk,” said Steve. “We’ll wake Phil and put him into Joe’s. Come on, Phil! Wake up! Moldie just blew the lid off the coffee-pot and the galley’s awash!”

“Set your sights,” muttered Phil. “Seven thousand five hundred yards.... Knots fifty-two....”