Aircraft and Submarines Part 26

The boat started downward with a jerk toward the seemingly hungry rising and falling swells. Then we stopped and remained suspended in mid-air while the men at the bow and the stern swore and tusselled with the lowering ropes. The stern of the boat was down, the bow up, leaving us at an angle of about forty-five degrees. We clung to the seats to save ourselves from falling out.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Permission of _Scientific American_.

_Salvaging H-3, View I._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Permission of _Scientific American_.

_Salvaging H-3, View II._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Permission of _Scientific American_.

_Salvaging H-3, View III._]

"Who's got a knife? A knife! a knife!" bawled a sweating seaman in the bow.

"Great G.o.d! Give him a knife," bawled a half-dressed, gibbering negro stoker who wrung his hands in the stern.

A hatchet was thrust into my hand, and I forwarded it to the bow.

There was a flash of sparks as it crashed down on the holding pulley. Many feet and hands pushed the boat from the side of the ship and we sagged down again, this time smacking squarely on the billowy top of a rising swell.

As we pulled away from the side of the ship its receding terrace of lights stretched upward. The ship was slowly turning over. We were opposite that part occupied by the engine rooms. There was a tangle of oars, spars and rigging on the seat and considerable confusion before four of the big sweeps could be manned on either side of the boat.

The gibbering bullet-headed negro was pulling directly behind me and I turned to quiet him as his frantic reaches with his oar were hitting me in the back.

"Get away from her, get away from her," he kept repeating. "When the water hits her hot boilers she'll blow up, and there's just tons and tons of shrapnel in the hold."

His excitement spread to other members of the crew in the boat.

It was the give-way of nerve tension. It was bedlam and nightmare.

We rested on our oars, with all eyes on the still lighted _Laconia_. The torpedo had struck at 10.30 P. M. It was thirty minutes afterward that another dull thud, which was accompanied by a noticeable drop in the hulk, told its story of the second torpedo that the submarine had despatched through the engine room and the boat's vitals from a distance of two hundred yards.

We watched silently during the next minute, as the tiers of lights dimmed slowly from white to yellow, then a red, and nothing was left but the murky mourning of the night, which hung over all like a pall.

A mean, cheese-coloured crescent of a moon revealed one horn above a ragged bundle of clouds low in the distance. A rim of blackness settled around our little world, relieved only by general leering stars in the zenith, and where the _Laconia's_ lights had shone there remained only the dim outlines of a blacker hulk standing out above the water like a jagged headland, silhouetted against the overcast sky.

The ship sank rapidly at the stern until at last its nose stood straight in the air. Then it slid silently down and out of sight like a piece of disappearing scenery in a panorama spectacle.

Boat No. 3 stood closest to the ship and rocked about in a perilous sea of clashing spars and wreckage. As our boat's crew steadied its head into the wind a black hulk, glistening wet and standing about eight feet above the surface of the water, approached slowly and came to a stop opposite the boat and not six feet from the side of it.

"What ship was dot?" The correct words in throaty English with a German accent came from the dark hulk, according to Chief Steward Ballyn's statement to me later.

"The _Laconia_," Ballyn answered.

"Vot?"

"The _Laconia_, Cunard Line," responded the steward.

"Vot did she weigh?" was the next question from the submarine.

"Eighteen thousand tons."

"Any pa.s.sengers?"

"Seventy-three," replied Ballyn, "men, women, and children, some of them in this boat. She had over two hundred in the crew."

"Did she carry cargo?"

"Yes."

"Well, you'll be all right. The patrol will pick you up soon."

And without further sound save for the almost silent fixing of the conning tower lid, the submarine moved off.

There was no a.s.surance of an early pick-up, even tho the promise were from a German source, for the rest of the boats, whose occupants--if they felt and spoke like those in my boat--were more than mildly anxious about their plight and the prospects of rescue.

The fear of some of the boats crashing together produced a general inclination toward further separation on the part of all the little units of survivors, with the result that soon the small craft stretched out for several miles, all of them endeavouring to keep their heads in the wind.

And then we saw the first light--the first sign of help coming--the first searching glow of white brilliance, deep down on the sombre sides of the black pot of night that hung over us.

It was way over there--first a trembling quiver of silver against the blackness; then, drawing closer, it defined itself as a beckoning finger, altho still too far away yet to see our feeble efforts to attract it....

We pulled, pulled, l.u.s.tily forgetting the strain and pain of innards torn and racked from pain, vomiting--oblivious of blistered hands and wet, half frozen feet.

Then a nodding of that finger of light--a happy, snapping, c.r.a.p-shooting finger that seemed to say: "Come on, you men," like a dice-player wooing the bones--led us to believe that our lights had been seen. This was the fact, for immediately the coming vessel flashed on its green and red side-lights and we saw it was headed for our position.

"Come alongside port!" was megaphoned to us. And as fast as we could we swung under the stern, while a dozen flashlights blinked down to us and orders began to flow fast and thick.

A score of hands reached out, and we were suspended in the husky tattooed arms of those doughty British jack tars, looking up into the weather-beaten, youthful faces, mumbling thanks and thankfulness and reading in the gold lettering on their pancake hats the legend "H. M. S. Laburnum."

Of course, the submarine fleets of the various navies paid a heavy toll too. It has become, however, increasingly difficult to get any accurate figures of these losses. The British navy, it is known, has lost during 1914, 1915, and 1916 twelve boats, some of which foundered, were wrecked or mined while others simply never returned.

The loss of eight German submarines has also been definitely established. Others, however, are known to have been lost, and their number has been greatly increased since the arming of merchantmen.

In 1917 it was estimated that the Germans lost one U-boat a week and built three.

Just what sensations a man experiences in a submerged submarine that finds it impossible to rise again, is, of course, more or less of a mystery. For, though submarines, the entire crew of which perished, have been raised later, only one record has ever been known to have been made covering the period during which death by suffocation or drowning stared their occupants in the face. This heroic and pathetic record was written in form of a letter by the commander of a j.a.panese submarine, Lieutenant Tak.u.ma Faotomu, whose boat, with its entire crew, was lost on April 15, 1910, during manoeuvres in Hiroshima Bay. The letter reads in part as follows:

[Ill.u.s.tration: International Film Service, Inc.

_U. S. Submarine D 1 off Weehawken._]

Although there is, indeed, no excuse to make for the sinking of his Imperial Majesty's boat and for the doing away of subordinates through my heedlessness, all on the boat have discharged their duties well and in everything acted calmly until death. Although we are departing in pursuance of our duty to the State, the only regret we have is due to anxiety lest the men of the world may misunderstand the matter, and that thereby a blow may be given to the future development of submarines. While going through gasoline submarine exercise, we submerged too far, and when we attempted to shut the sluice-valve, the chain in the meantime gave way. Then we tried to close the sluice-valve, by hand, but it was too late, the rear part being full of water, and the boat sank at an angle of about twenty-five degrees.

The switchboard being under water, the electric lights gave out.

Offensive gas developed and respiration became difficult. The above has been written under the light of the conning-tower when it was 11.45 o'clock. We are now soaked by the water that has made its way in. Our clothes are very wet and we feel cold. I have always expected death whenever I left my home, and therefore my will is already in the drawer at Karasaki. I beg, respectfully, to say to his Majesty that I respectfully request that none of the families left by my subordinates shall suffer.

The only matter I am anxious about now is this. Atmospheric pressure is increasing, and I feel as if my tympanum were breaking. At 12.30 o'clock respiration is extraordinarily difficult. I am breathing gasoline. I am intoxicated with gasoline. It is 12.40 o'clock.

Could there be a more touching record of the way in which a brave man met death?