“Abide with Me” in a Submarine
Fiction has rarely given us anything more arrestingly strange than the following narration of a few minutes of life with their bewildering experience. The story was related in The Methodist Recorder, London, in its issue of December 19, 1946, and is here reproduced in the exact words of the writer, Campbell Marr of Kirkaldy:
“In the early days of the war (World War II) a British submarine was trapped at the bottom of the Heligoland Bight through an unlocated defect in the machinery. In frantic despair the engineers endeavored to find the fault, but without success.
“When the oxygen supply was almost exhausted the lieutenant in charge assembled the crew and told them that the situation was beyond all hope. He gave each man an opiate so that death might be made easier. Someone started to sing that very popular hymn:
“‘Abide with me,’
and they all joined in. Suddenly one man swooned, and fell into the machinery and immediately the lights went on and the engine commenced to buzz. The man in his fall had operated a lever which in the light of the hand torches had been overlooked.
“In a few minutes they had surfaced, and were thanking God for their miraculous deliverance. Many of these men are now back in civilian life, and not one of them is ever likely to forget that grand old hymn.”