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.