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....