Chapter VIII: The Navy-Under-The-Sea

The year or so before the war found the Submarine Service still in its infancy, untried, unsung, a jest among the big-ship folk of the Navy-that-floats, who pointed with inelegant gestures from these hundred-feet cigar-shaped egg-shells to their own towering steel-shod rams and the nineteen-thousand-odd tons behind each of them.

The Submarine Service had no leisure for jests at that time, even if they had seen anything particularly humorous about the comparison. In an intensely grim and practical way they were dreamers, “greatly dreaming”: and they knew that the day was not far off when these little wet ships of theirs would come into their own and hold, in the bow and stern of each fragile hull, the keys of death and of hell.

The Navy-that-Floats--the Navy of aiguillettes and “boiled shirts,” of bathrooms and Sunday-morning divisions--dubbed them pirates. Pirates, because they went about His Majesty’s business in football sweaters and grey flannel trousers tucked into their huge sea-boots, returning to harbour with a week’s growth of beard and memories of their last bath grown dim.

The Submarine Service was more interested in white mice[3] than pirates in those days, because it was growing up; but the allusion stuck in the memory of one who, at the outbreak of war, drew first blood for the submarines. He returned to harbour flying a tiny silk Skull-and-Crossbones at his masthead, to find himself the object of the Navy’s vociferous admiration, and later (because such quips exchanged between branches of the Naval Service are apt to get misconstrued in less-enlightened circles) of their Lordships’ displeasure.

The time had come, in short, when it was the turn of the Submarine Service to develop a sense of humour: humour of a sort that was apt to be a trifle dour, but it was acquired in a dour school. They may be said to have learned it tickling Death in the ribs: and at that game he who laughs last laughs decidedly loudest.

The materials for mirth in submarine circles are commonly such as can be easily come by: bursting bombs, mines, angry trawlers, and the like. Things not in themselves funny, perhaps, but taken in conjunction---- However....

A sower went forth sowing; she moved circumspectly at night on the surface and during the day descended to the bottom, where her crew slept, ate sausages and fried eggs and had concerts; there were fourteen items on the programme because the days were long, and five instruments in the orchestra. For two nights she groped her way through shoals and sand-banks, negotiating nineteen known minefields, and only the little fishes can tell how many unknown ones. Early in the third night she fixed her position, completed her grim sowing (thereby adding a twentieth to the number of known minefields within a few square miles off the German coast) and proceeded to return home. At dawn she was sighted by two German seaplanes on patrol; she dived immediately, but the winged enemy, travelling at a hundred miles an hour, were on top of her before the swirl of her dive had left the water.

Now it must be explained that a certain electrically controlled mechanism in the interior of a submarine is so constructed that if any shock throws it out of adjustment, a bell rings loudly to advertise the fact. As the submarine dived, two bombs dropped from the clouds burst in rapid succession dangerously adjacent to the hull.

The boat was still trembling from the concussion when sharp and clear above the hum of the motors rang out the electric bell referred to.

“Maria,” said a voice out of the shimmering perspective of machinery and motionless figures awaiting Death, “Give the gentleman a bag of nuts!”

* * * * *

In spite of nearly three years of war, the memory of the days when the big Navy laughed at its uncouth fledgling has not altogether died away from the minds of the Submarine Service. Opportunities for repartee come none too often, but they are rarely missed.

Now the branch of the parent Navy with which the Submarine Service has remained most in touch is the department concerned with mines and torpedoes. The headquarters of such craftmanship is properly a shore establishment: but following the custom of the Navy it retains the name of the hulk from which it evolved, and is known in Service circles as H.M.S. _Vernon_.

A certain submarine was returning from what (to borrow a phrase from German naval _communiqués_) may be described as an enterprise. It was one which involved a number of hazardous feats, not least of which was navigating submerged in an area from which the enemy had removed all buoys and lights, and was patrolling with destroyers and Teutonic thoroughness.

The submarine was proceeding thus at slow speed with her crew at their stations. Their countenances wore expressions similar to those on the faces of the occupants of a railway carriage travelling through a tunnel. One, a red-pated man, tattooed like a Patagonian chieftain, sat with his lips pursed up in a soundless whistle, watching a needle flicker on a dial, while he marked time to an imaginary tune with his foot.

A sharp metallic concussion jarred the outer shell of the fore compartment. It was followed a second later by another, farther aft, and then another. Six times that terrible sound jolted the length of the boat, and then all was silence. The noise made by a mine striking a submarine under water is one few have lived to describe, yet every man there interpreted it on the instant.

They waited in the uncomfortable knowledge that mines are sometimes fitted with delay-action primers which explode them some seconds after impact. Then suddenly the tension broke. For the first time the red-headed man took his eyes from the dial, and his foot stopped its noiseless tattoo.

“Good old _Vernon_!” he said sourly. “Another blasted ‘dud’!”

Once clear of their own bases and the sight of war signal stations, the submarine is an outlaw on the high seas, fending for itself in the teeth of friend or foe. True there is an elaborate system of recognition signals in force, but the bluff seamen in command of the armed auxiliaries that guard the seaways round the coast have a way of acting first and talking afterwards. It is the way of the sea.

A homing submarine on the surface encountered one of these gale-battered craft, and in spite of vehement signals found herself under a rain of projectiles from the trawler’s gun. Realising that the customary signals were of no avail, the commanding officer of the submarine bethought him of a still more easily interpreted code. The second-in-command dived down the conning-tower, snatched the tablecloth off the breakfast table, and together they waved it in token of abject surrender.

The trawler ceased fire and the submarine approached near enough to establish her identity with hand-flags. The white-bearded skipper of the trawler was moved to the depths of his Methody soul.

“Thank God!” he signalled back, “thank God I didn’t hit you!”

“Amen!” replied the hand-flags, and then after a pause: “What did _you_ do in the Great War, daddy?”

* * * * *

Those who go down to the bottom of the sea in submarines are wont to say (in public at all events) that since they gave up groping among the moorings of the Turkish minefields in the Narrows, very little happens to them nowadays that is really exciting.

This of course is largely a question of the standard by which you are accustomed to measure excitement. Half an hour’s perusal of the official reports made by the captains of these little wet ships on return to harbour almost leads to the supposition that each writer stifled his yawns of boredom with one hand while he wrote with the other.

Yet to the initiated Death peeps out half a dozen times in the length of a page, between the written lines in which he is so studiously ignored. The culmination of years of training, ten seconds of calculated judgment and a curt order, which cost the German Navy a battleship, is rendered thus into prose: “5 a.m. Fired both bow torpedoes at 1,200 yards range at last ship in line. Hit. Dived.”

But let us begin at the beginning....

At three o’clock one summer morning a British submarine was sitting on the surface admiring the face of the waters. There was a waning moon, and by its light she presently observed a line of German light cruisers stealing across her bow. She waited, because they were steering west, and it is not the custom of such craft to go west alone; two minutes later she sighted the smoke of five battle cruisers also going west. She allowed the leading ship to come within 800 yards and fired a torpedo at her; missed, and found herself in the middle of a broadside of shell of varying calibres, all pitching unpleasantly close. She dived like a coot, and with such good-will that she struck the bottom and stopped there for a quarter of an hour putting things straight again.

At 4 a.m. the submarine climbed to the surface and found two squadrons of battleships blackening the sky with smoke, screened by destroyers on all sides and brooded over by Zeppelins. She fired at two miles range and missed the flagship, halved the range and fired again--this time at the last ship in the line--and blew a hole in her side through which you could drive a motor omnibus. She then dived to a considerable depth and sat and listened to the “chug” of the destroyers’ propellers circling overhead and the detonations of their explosive charges. These gradually grew fainter as the hunt moved away on a false trail.

The submarine then came up and investigated; the remainder of the German Fleet had vanished, leaving their crippled sister to the ministrations of the destroyers, who were visible casting about in all directions, “apparently,” says the report dryly, “searching for me.” The stricken battleship, with a heavy list, was wallowing in the direction of the German coast, sagging through a right angle as she went. The menace that stalked her fetched a wide circle, reloading on the way, and took up a position ahead favourable for the _coup de grâce_. She administered it at 1,500 yards range and dived, praising Allah.

Later, having breakfasted to the accompaniment of distant explosions of varying force, she rose to the surface again. It was a clear sunny morning with perfect visibility; the battleship had vanished and on the horizon the smoke of the retreating destroyers made faint spirals against the blue.

Since British submarines specialise in attacking enemy men-of-war only, their operations are chiefly confined to waters where such craft are most likely to be found. Those who read the lesson of Jutland aright will therefore be able to locate roughly the area of British submarine activity.

In the teeth of every defensive device known to Kultur, despite moored mines, explosive nets, and decoys of fiendish ingenuity, this ceaseless patrol is maintained. Winter and summer, from sunset to dawn and dawn to sunrise, there the little wet ships watch and wait. Where the long yellow seas break in clouds of surf across sandbanks and no man dares to follow, they lie and draw their breath. Their inquisitive periscopes rise and dip in the churning wake of the German minesweepers themselves. They rise out of the ambush of depths where the groundswell of a forgotten gale stirs the sand into a fog; and an unsuspecting Zeppelin, flying low, lumbers, buzzing angrily, out of range of their high-angle gun.

Here too come other submarines, returning from a cruise with the murder of unarmed merchantmen to their unforgettable discredit. They come warily, even in their own home waters, and more often than not submerged; but they meet the little wet ships from time to time, and the record of their doubtful achievements remains thenceforward a song unsung.

A British submarine on patrol sighted through her periscope the periscope of another submarine. So close were the two boats that to discharge a torpedo would have been as dangerous to one as the other, and the commanding officer of the British boat accordingly rammed his opponent. Neither boat was travelling fast, and he had fully three seconds in which to make his decision and act on it.

Locked together thus, they dropped down through the depths; the German blowing all his tanks in furious efforts to rise; the other flooding every available inch of space in a determined effort to force his adversary down and drown him.

Now the hull of a submarine is tested to resist the pressure of the water up to a certain depth; after that the joints leak, plates buckle, and finally the whole structure collapses like a crumpled egg-shell. With one eye on the depth-gauge the British lieutenant forced the German down to the safety limit and, foot by foot, beyond it. Then gradually they heard the enemy begin to bump along their bottom; he had broken away from the death-lock and was rolling helplessly aft beneath their hull. The sounds ceased and the needle on the dial jerked back and began to retrace its course. The British submarine rose, to contemplate a circle of oil slowly widening on the surface in the region of the encounter.

Few of these grim games of Peep-bo! are without a moral of some sort. A gentleman adventurer within the mouth of a certain river was aware of a considerable to-do on board flag-draped tugs and river-craft; he himself shared in the universal elation on sighting through his periscope a large submarine, also gaily decked with flags, evidently proceeding on a trial trip. He waited until she was abreast of him and then torpedoed her, blowing her sky-high. Remained then the business of getting home.

Dashing blindly down towards the open sea with periscope beneath the surface, he stuck on a sandbank and there lay, barely submerged. A Zeppelin at once located him: but in view of his position and the almost certain prospect of his capture, forbore to drop bombs; instead she indicated his position to a flotilla of destroyers and stood by to watch the fun. The commander of the submarine raised his periscope for a final look round and found a destroyer abreast his stern torpedo tube. He admits that things looked blackish, but there was the torpedo in the tube and there was the destroyer.

He fired and hit her; the next instant, released from the embrace of the mud by the shock of the discharge, the submarine quietly slid into deep water and returned home.

In big brass letters on an ebonite panel in the interior of the submarine is her motto--one word: RESURGAM.

* * * * *

There are both heights and depths attainable by the Spirit of Man, concerning which the adventurer who has been there is for ever silent. His mother or his wife may eventually wring something out of him, but not another man. Readers of the following narrative must therefore content themselves with the bald facts and the consolation that they are true. What the man thought about during his two hours’ fight for life: how he felt when Death, acknowledging defeat, opened his bony fingers and let him go, is his own affair--and possibly one other’s.

Disaster overtook a certain British submarine one day and she filled and sank. Before the engulfing water could reach the after-compartment, however, the solitary occupant, a stoker petty officer, succeeded in closing the watertight door. This compartment was the engine-room of the boat, and, save for the glimmer of one lamp which continued to burn dimly through an “earth,” was in darkness.

Now it happened that this solitary living entity, in the unutterable loneliness of the darkness, imprisoned fathoms deep below the wind and sunlight of his world, had a plan. It was one he had been wont to discuss with the remainder of the crew in leisure moments (without, it may be added, undue encouragement) by which a man might save his life in just such an emergency as had now arisen. Briefly, it amounted to this: water admitted into the hull of a submarine will rise until the pressure of the air inside equalises the pressure of the water outside: this providing the air cannot escape. A sudden opening in the upper part of the shell would release the pent-up air in the form of a gigantic bubble; this, rushing surface-wards, would carry with it an object lighter than an equal volume of water--such, for instance, as a live man. It was his idea, then, to admit the water as high as it would rise, open the iron hatchway through which torpedoes were lowered into the submarine, and thus escape in the consequent evulsion of imprisoned air. It was a desperate plan, but granted ideal conditions and unfailing luck, there was no reason why it should not succeed. In this case the conditions for putting it into execution were, unfortunately, the reverse of ideal.

The water spurted through the strained joints in the plating and through the voice-pipes that connected the flooded forepart with the engine-room. With it came an additional menace in the form of chlorine gas, generated by the contact of salt water with the batteries; the effect of this gas on human beings was fully appreciated by the Germans when they adopted it in the manufacture of asphyxiating shells....

To ensure a rapid exit the heavy torpedo-hatch had to be disconnected from its hinges and securing bars, and it could only be reached from the top of the engines. The water was rising steadily, and the heat given off by the slowly cooling engines can be better imagined than described. Grasping a heavy spanner in his hand, the prisoner climbed up into this inferno and began his fight for life.

His first attempt to remove the securings of the hatch was frustrated by the weight of the water on the upper surface of the submarine; this would be ultimately overcome by the air pressure inside, but not till the water had risen considerably. Every moment’s delay increased the gas and some faster means of flooding the compartment had to be devised. The man climbed down and tried various methods, groping about in the choking darkness, diving below the scummy surface of the slowly rising tide to feel for half-forgotten valves. In the course of this he came in contact with the switchboard of the dynamo and narrowly escaped electrocution.

Shaken by the shock, and half suffocated by the gas, he eventually succeeded in admitting a quicker flow of water; the internal pressure lifted the hatch off its seating sufficiently to enable him to knock off the securings. The water still rose, but thinking that he now had sufficient pressure accumulated, he made his first bid for freedom. Three times he succeeded in raising the hatch, but not sufficiently to allow him to pass: each time the air escaped and each time the hatch fell again before he could get through.

More pressure was needed, which meant that more water would have to be admitted from the fore-compartment, and with it unfortunately more gas. First of all, however, the hatch had to be secured again. The man dived to the bottom of the boat and found the securing clips, swam up with them and secured the hatch once more. Then he opened the deadlight between the two compartments a little way, increased the inrush of water, and climbing back on to the top of the engines knocked the bolts away.

As he expected the hatch flew open, but the pressure was not now sufficient to blow him out. He started to climb out, when down came the hatch again, and fastened on his hand, crushing it beneath its weight. By dint of wedging his shoulder beneath the hatch he succeeded in finally releasing his hand and allowed the hatch to drop back into its place.

Loss of consciousness, nerve, or hope would have sealed his doom any moment during the past two hours, but even in this bitter extremity his indomitable courage refused to be beaten. Gassed, electrocuted, maimed, cornered like a rat in a hole, he rallied all his faculties for a final desperate effort. Crawling down again, he swam to the deadlight and knocked off the nuts to admit the full rush of water. The compartment would now flood completely, but it was his last chance. He climbed back under the hatch and waited.

The water rose until it reached the coaming of the hatch; with his final remnant of strength he forced up the hatch for the last time. The air leaped surface-wards, driven out by the water which impatiently invaded the last few feet it had striven for so long. With it, back through a depth of sixty feet, back to God’s sunlight and men’s voices and life, passed a Man.

* * * * *

The Navy-that-Floats and the Navy-that-Flies usually go about their work sustained by the companionship of others of their kin. From first to last their ways are plain for all men to behold. They fight, and if need be, die, heartened by the reek of cordite-smoke and cheering, or full-flight between the sun and the gaze of breathless armies. It is otherwise with the Navy-under-the-Sea.

Submarines may leave harbour in pairs, their conning-towers awash, and the busy hand-flags exchanging dry witticisms and personalities between the respective captains. But as the land fades astern, of necessity their ways part; it is a rule of the game in the Submarine Service that you do your work alone; oft-times in darkness, and more often still in the shadow of death.

There is appointed an hour and a day when each boat should return. After that there is a margin, during which a boat might return; it is calculated to cover every conceivable contingency; and as the days pass, and the slow hours drag their way round the wardroom clock on board the Submarine Depot Ship, the silences round the fireplace grow longer and there is a tendency in men’s minds to remember little things. Thus he looked or lit a pipe: scooped the pool at poker: held his dog’s head between his hands and laughed.... After that a typewritten list of names is pinned on the wall of the little chapel ashore, and here and there among the rows of quiet houses on the hill some white-faced woman folds up empty garments and slowly begins to pack.... That is all. From first to last, utter silence and the Unknown.

In this way has been begotten a tradition peculiar to the Navy-under-the-Sea. In the parent Navy it is not meet to talk “shop” out of working hours; in the Navy-under-the-Sea every aspect of life is a jest; but neither in seriousness nor in jest does one refer to Death.

A certain lieutenant in command of a British submarine was returning from patrol in waters frequented by German men-of-war, when he rescued the crew of a Danish steamer torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. It was blowing a gale and his timely intervention saved the lives of the castaways.

The Depot Wardroom listened to the tale and approved. It even warned the hero that he might find himself the possessor of a pair of presentation binoculars if he weren’t careful. The hero expressed his views on that aspect of the affair (they need not be repeated here) and straightway forgot the incident.

He was on his way back from his next spell of patrol work a few weeks later when he again encountered in an open boat the crew of another torpedoed ship. They were Dutch this time, and they had been pulling for nineteen hours in a winter gale, so that their hands were flayed to the bone. These he also rescued and brought back with him to the base; thence they were sent in comfort to their native land to reflect at leisure on Germany’s methods of conducting submarine warfare, as compared with those of Great Britain.

A few days later a deputation of his brother submarine captains summoned the hero to the wardroom (what time the sun had risen over the fore-yard), and there, to the accompaniment of cocktails and an illuminated address, solemnly presented him with a pair of binoculars subtly fashioned out of beer bottles: in the wording of the gunner’s supply note that accompanied them “complete in case, tin, black-japanned.” That all things might be done decently and in order, the recipient was bidden to sign an official receipt-note for the same.

Now the moral of this may appear a trifle obscure; but it serves to illustrate the attitude towards life of the Navy-under-the-Sea. The lives of these defenceless victims of Hunnish brutality had been saved--therefore the occasion demanded not heroics, but high mirth. The hero of the affair admits to having partly missed the joke. But this may be accounted for by the fact that the binoculars were empty, and that later on, when presented with his monthly mess-bill, he discovered that the official receipt which bore his signature included the cocktails ordered by the deputation during the presentation ceremony. So much for the Jest of Life.

There is a private magazine which appears monthly in a certain east-coast port; it is edited by a submarine officer, written by submarine officers, and its circulation is confined chiefly to the Navy-under-the-Sea: but it affords the truest and clearest insight that can be obtained of the psychology of the Submarine Service.

The success of a publication of this nature depends upon raw personalities--indeed there is very little other “copy” obtainable; the readers demand it voraciously, and the victims chuckle and tear off the editor’s trousers in the smoking-room. Month by month, as you turn the witty pages, familiar names reappear, derided, scandalously libelled, mercilessly chaffed to make the mirth of the Mess. Then abruptly a name appears no more.

“Art called away to the north.
Old sea-dog? Yet, ere you depart,
Clasp once more this hand held forth....
Good-bye! God bless your dear old heart!”

The above lines are quoted from the magazine in question, with the editor’s permission, and in reverent memory of a very gallant officer, to sum up, as no prose could, the attitude towards Death of these “gentlemen unafraid.”

It happened that another of Britain’s little wet ships went into the northern mists and returned no more. As was the custom, a brother officer of the Submarine Service went ashore to tell the tale to the wife of her commanding officer, returning from the task white and silent.

A few months later the officers of the flotilla to which the boat had belonged were asked to elect a sponsor for the little son of their dead comrade. Now since the life of any one of them was no very certain pledge, they chose three: of whom one was the best boxer, another the best footballer, and the third owned the lowest golf handicap in their community. In due course the boy was destined to become a submarine officer also, and it behoved the Submarine Service to see that he was brought up in such a way as to be best fitted for that service, sure of hand and heart and eye.

Thus in life and death the spirit of the Navy-under-the-Sea endures triumphant. Prating they leave to others, content to follow their unseen ways in silence and honour. Whoever goes among them for a while learns many lessons; but chiefly perhaps they make it clear that the best of Life is its humour, and of Death the worst is but a brief forgetting....