World's War Events Volume III Part 14

"Yes, the men were wonderful--wonderful. And there wasn't very much sickness. Let's see, how far had I got?--Since it was impossible to make any headway, we lay to for forty-eight hours. The deck began to go the second morning, some of the plates being ripped right off. And blow--well, as I told you in the beginning, I never saw anything like it. The disk of the sea was just one great ragged ma.s.s of foam being hurled through s.p.a.ce by a wind screaming past with the voice and force of a million express trains.

[Sidenote: The submarines run on the surface to save electricity.]

"Perhaps you are wondering why we didn't submerge. We simply couldn't use up our electricity. It takes oil and running on the surface to create the electric power, and we had a long, long journey ahead. Then ice began to form on the superstructure, and we had to get out a crew to chop it off. It was something of a job; there wasn't much to hang on to, and the waves were still breaking over us. But we freed her of the danger, and she went on--

"We used to wonder where the other boys were, in the midst of all the racket. One ship was drifting toward the New England coast, her compa.s.s smashed to flinders; others had run for Bermuda, others were still at sea.

[Sidenote: Good weather at last.]

"Then we had three days of good easterly wind. By jingo, but the good weather was great! Were we glad to have it?--oh, boy! We had just got things shipshape again when we had another blow, but this second one was by no means as bad as the first. And after that we had another spell of decent weather. The crew used to start the phonograph and keep it going all day.

[Sidenote: Reaching a friendly coast.]

"The weather was so good that I decided to keep right on to the harbor which was to be our base over here. I had enough oil, plenty of water; the only possible danger was a shortage of provisions. So I put us all on a ration, arranging to have the last grand meal on Christmas day. Can you imagine Christmas on a little storm-b.u.mped submarine some hundred miles off the coast? A day or two more and we ran calmly into--shall we say, 'deleted' harbor?

[Sidenote: The men rejoice at food and baths.]

"Hungry, dirty; oh, so dirty! We hadn't had any sort of bath or wash for about three weeks; we all were green-looking from having been cooped up so long, and our unshaven grease-streaked faces would have upset a dinosaur. The authorities were wonderfully kind, and looked after us and our men in the very best style. I thought we could never stop eating, and a real sleep--oh, boy!"

"Did you fly the flag as you came in?" I asked.

"You bet we did!" answered the captain, his keen, handsome face lighting at the memory. "You see," he continued in a practical spirit, "they would probably have pumped us full of holes if we hadn't."

And that is the way the American submarines crossed the Atlantic to do their share for the Great Cause.

[Sidenote: A guest on the mother-ship.]

I got to the port of the submarines just as an uncertain and rainy afternoon had finally decided to turn into a wild and disagreeable night. Short, drenching showers of rain fell, one after the other, like the strokes of a lash; a wind came up out of the sea, and one could hear the thunder of surf on the headlands. The mother-ship lay moored in a wild, desolate, and indescribably romantic bay; she floated in a sheltered pool, a very oasis of modernity, a marvelous creature of another world and another time. There was just light enough for me to see that her lines were those of a giant yacht. Then a curtain of rain beat hissing down on the sea, and the ship and the vague darkening landscape disappeared--disappeared as if they had melted away in the shower. Presently the bulk of the vessel appeared again. At once we drew alongside, and from that moment on, I was the guest of the vessel, recipient of a hospitality and courtesy for which I here make grateful acknowledgment to my friends and hosts.

[Sidenote: The ship is most skillfully handled.]

The mother-ship of the submarines was a combination of flagship, supply-station, repair-shop, and hotel. The officers of the submarines had rooms aboard her, which they occupied when off patrol, and the crews off duty slung their hammocks 'tween decks. The boat was pretty well crowded, having more submarines to look after than she had been built to care for; but thanks to the skill of her officers, everything was going as smoothly as could be. The vessel had, so to speak, a submarine atmosphere. Everybody aboard lived, worked, and would have died for the submarine. They believed in the submarine, believed in it with an enthusiasm which rested on pillars of practical fact.

[Sidenote: The heroism of the men who tried the first submarine.]

The chief of staff was the youngest captain in our navy; a man of hard energy and keen insight; one to whom our submarine service owes a very genuine debt. His officers were specialists: the surgeon of the vessel had been for years engaged in studying the hygiene of submarines, and was constantly working to free the atmosphere of the vessels from deleterious gases and to improve the living conditions of the crews. I remember listening one night to a history of the submarine, told by one of the officers of the staff; and for the first time in my life I came to appreciate at its full value the heroism of the men who risked their lives in the first cranky, clumsy, uncertain little vessels, and the imagination and the faith of the men who believed in the type. Ten years ago, a descent in a sub was an adventure to be prefaced by tears and making of wills; to-day submarines are chasing submarines hundreds of miles at sea, are crossing the ocean, and have grown from a tube of steel not much larger than a lifeboat, to underwater cruisers which carry six-inch guns.

Said an officer to me, "The future of the submarine? Why, sir, the submarine is the only war vessel that's going to have a future!"

[Sidenote: The submarines are moved alongside.]

On the night of my arrival, once dinner was over, I went on deck and looked down through the rain at the submarines moored alongside. They lay close by, one beside the other, in a pool of radiance cast by a number of electric lights hanging over each open hatchway. Beyond this pool lay the rain and the dark; within it, their sides awash in the clear green water of the bay, their gray bridges and rust-stained superstructures shining in the rain, lay the strange, bulging, crocodilian shapes of steel. There was something unearthly, something not of this world or time, in the picture; I might have been looking at invaders of the sleeping earth. The wind swept past in great booming salvoes; rain fell in sloping, liquid rods through the brilliancy of electric lamps burning with a steadiness that had something in it strange, incomprehensible, and out of place in the motion of the storm.

And then a hand appeared on the topmost rung of the nearer ladder, and a bulky sailor, a very human sailor in very human dungarees, poked his head out of the aperture, surveyed the inhospitable night, and disappeared.

[Sidenote: Submarines are going out to-night.]

"He's on Branch's boat. They're going out to-night," said the officer who was guiding me about.

"To-night? How on earth will he ever find his way to the open sea?"

"Knows the bay like a book. However, if the weather gets any worse, I doubt if the captain will let him go. Branch will be wild if they don't let him out. Somebody has just reported wreckage off the coast, so there must be a Hun round."

"But aren't our subs sometimes mistaken for Germans?"

"Oh, yes," was the calm answer.

[Sidenote: The boats may never come back.]

I thought of that ominous phrase I had noted in the British records,--"failed to report,"--and I remembered the stolid British captain who had said to me, speaking of submarines, "Sometimes n.o.body knows just what happened. Out there in the deep water, whatever happens, happens in a hurry."

My guide and I went below to the officers' corridor. Now and then, through the quiet, a mandolin or guitar could be heard far off tw.a.n.ging some sentimental island ditty; and beneath these sweeter sounds lay a monotonous mechanical humming.

"What's that sound?" I asked.

"That's the Filipino mess-boys having a little festino in their quarters. The humming? Oh, that's the mother-ship's dynamos charging the batteries of Branch's boat. Saves running on the surface."

[Sidenote: The captain of the patrol cheerful.]

My guide knocked at a door. Within his tidy little room, the captain who was to go out on patrol was packing the personal belongings he needed on the trip.

"h.e.l.lo!" he cried cheerily when he saw us; "come on in. I'm only doing a little packing up. What's it like outside?"

"Raining same as ever, but I don't think it's blowing up any harder."

[Sidenote: Reading matter is in demand.]

"Hooray!" cried the young captain with heartfelt sincerity; "then I'll get out to-night. You know the captain told me that if it got any worse, he'd hold me till to-morrow morning. I told him I'd rather go out to-night. Perfect cinch once you get to the mouth of the bay; all you have to do is submerge and take it easy. What do you think of the news?

Smithie thinks he saw a Hun yesterday. Got anything good to read?

Somebody's pinched that magazine I was reading. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen--that ought to be enough handkerchiefs. h.e.l.lo, there goes the juice!"

The humming of the dynamo was dying away slowly, fading with an effect of lengthening distance. The guitar orchestra, as if to celebrate its deliverance, burst into a triumphant rendering of Sousa's "Stars and Stripes."

My guide and I waited till after midnight to watch the going of Branch's _Z-5_. Branch and his second, stuffed into black oilskins down whose gleaming surface ran beaded drops of rain, stood on the bridge; a number of sailors were busy doing various things along the deck. The electric lights shone in all their calm unearthly brilliance. Then slowly, very slowly, the _Z-5_ began to gather headway, the clear water seemed to flow past her green sides, and she rode out of the pool of light into the darkness waiting close at hand.

"Good-bye! Good luck!" we cried.

A vagrant shower came roaring down into the shining pool.

"Good-bye!" cried voices through the night.

[Sidenote: The submarines disappear in the dark.]

Three minutes later all trace of the _Z-5_ had disappeared in the dark.

[Sidenote: Night and day are the same on a submarine.]

Captain Bill of the _Z-3_ was out on patrol. His vessel was running submerged. The air within--they had but recently dived--was new and sweet; and that raw cold which eats into submerged submarines had not begun to take the joy out of life. It was the third day out; the time, five o'clock in the afternoon. The outer world, however, did not penetrate into the submarine. Night or day, on the surface or submerged, only one time, a kind of motionless electric high noon, existed within those concave walls of gleaming cream-white enamel.