XXXII
Hunting The Submarine
Seaplanes cut practice circles over the fleet and then flew away on their errands, to be lost in the sky beyond the harbour entrance. With their floats, they were like ducks when they came to rest on the water, sturdy and a little clumsy looking compared to those hawks the army planes, soaring to higher altitudes.
The hawk had a broad, level field for its roost; the duck, bobbing with the waves after it came down, had its wings folded as became a bird at rest, after its engines stopped, and, a dead thing, was lifted on board its floating home with a crane, as cargo is swung into the hold.
On shipboard there must be shipshapeness; and that capacious, one-time popular Atlantic liner had undergone changes to prepare it for its mothering part, with platforms in place of the promenades where people had lounged during the voyage and bombs in place of deck-quoits and dining-saloons turned into workshops. Of course, one was shown the different sizes and types of bombs. Aviators exhibit them with the pride of a collector showing his porcelains. Every time they seem to me to have grown larger and more diabolical. Where will aerial progress end? Will the next war be fought by forces that dive and fly like fishes and birds?
"I'd like to drop that hundred-pounder on to a Zeppelin!" said one of the aviators. All the population of London would like to see him do it. And Fritz, the submarine, does not like to see the shadow of man's wings above the water.
Seaplanes and destroyers carry the imagination away from the fleet to another sphere of activity, which I had not the fortune to see. An aviator can see Fritz below a smooth surface; for he cannot travel much deeper than thirty or forty feet. He leaves a characteristic ripple and tell-tale bubbles of air and streaks of oil. When the planes have located him they tell the hunters where to go. Sometimes it is known that a submarine is in a certain region; he is lost sight of and seen again; a squall may cover his track a second time, and the hunters, keeping touch with the planes by signals, course here and there on the look out for another glimpse. Perhaps he escapes altogether. It is a tireless game of hide and seek, like gunnery at the front. Naval ingenuity has invented no end of methods, and no end of experiments have been tried. Strictest kept of naval secrets, these. Fritz is not to be told what to avoid and what not to avoid.
Very thin is the skin of a submarine; very fragile and complicated its machinery. It does not take much of a shock to put it out of order or a large charge of explosives to dent the skin beyond repair. It being in the nature of submarines to sink, how does the hunter know when he has struck a mortal blow? If oil and bubbles come up for some time in one place, or if they come up with a rush, that is suggestive. Then, it does not require a nautical mind to realize that by casting about on the bottom with a grapnel you will learn if an object with the bulk and size of a submarine is there. The Admiralty accept no guesswork from the hunters about their exploits; they must bring the brush to prove the kill.
With Admiral Crawford I went to see the submarine defences of the harbour. It reminded one of the days of the drawbridge to a castle, when a friend rode freely in and an enemy might try to swim the moat and scale the walls if he pleased.
"Take care! There is a tide here!" the coxswain was warned, lest the barge should get into some of the troubles meant for Fritz. "A cunning fellow, Fritz. We must give him no openings."
The openings appear long enough to permit British craft, whether trawlers, or flotillas, or cruiser squadrons, to go and come. Lying as close together as fish in a basket, I saw at one place a number of torpedo boats home from a week at sea.