The commander picked himself up, carefully brushed his uniform with his hands, and went to his post. “Let all things be done decently and in order” is the acknowledged, if unwritten, motto of British submarines. The officer’s action was the outward and visible sign that he had not forgotten it. He gave instructions for the pumps to be set in motion—if they were capable of movement. Everything depended on the answer. There were moments of tense anxiety before it came. No one, even the bravest of the brave, likes to be drowned like a rat in a trap. The motors were going. They had not stopped. But the pumps?
They started! With the beating of their pulse hope flowed in where before it had been on the ebb. The submarine came to the surface as game as ever, though terribly bruised. If “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” a kindly Providence most assuredly watched over this craft. In enemy waters, three hundred odd miles from home, with a broken nose and internal injuries, she had not too much strength for the journey. She accomplished it satisfactorily enough, and was back again in her old haunts within a few weeks.
There is a particularly poignant note of tragedy in a strange mishap that befell another British submarine. The why and the wherefore of the accident have now been revealed. She was on her trials, and the ventilating shafts had been left open, flooding the rear compartments and drowning thirty-one men. She took an unexpected plunge of thirty-eight feet, stuck fast in the mud, and positively refused to budge. She lay like a dead thing. Every conceivable means of resurrection was tried; each failed. One has read of wonderful life-saving devices that are supposed to be donned by submarine men when their boat is in difficulties. They look like smoke-helmets. All that is required is to don one of these affairs, enter the conning-tower, open the lid, and pop up like a cork. It sounds simple, even entertaining, and might be introduced as a side show at an exhibition as a change from the Flip-Flap. Whatever other submarines may have of this kind, this particular boat either did not possess or could not use.
Officers and crew watched the hands of the clock complete the circle several times. There was little else to do. One does not talk much when waiting for eternity. Each felt that he was a doomed man, that ere long his wife would be a widow and his children fatherless. There was ‘a war on,’ but was this war? No enemy had done this, unless Destiny be an enemy. The forty-two men who still lived were within a comparatively short distance of the Scottish shore.
A terrible way out suggested itself to Commander Francis Herbert Heaveningham Goodhart. It is a formidable name to remember in its lengthy entirety, but one to make a note of. No future Book of Sea Heroes will omit it and be reasonably complete. The surname, although it is without an ‘e,’ fitted the man and the deed. He already had the D.S.O. to his credit; his next award, the Albert Medal in gold, was posthumous. Now you know the tragedy of the story. The story of the tragedy remains to be told.
Goodhart’s “terrible way out” was this. The conning-tower of a submarine may be cut off from the boat by a trap-door. He proposed that a tin cylinder with a message giving full particulars of the position of the craft, the approximate length of time the men could hold out, and other details should be given to him, and that he should be blown up with it through the conning-tower. To effect this it was necessary to partly fill the chamber with water, turn on the high-pressure air, and release the clips that secured the lid. Placing the little cylinder in his belt, Goodhart set out on his last desperate adventure. Together with the commanding officer, who was to open and close the hatch, he stepped into the conning-tower. “If I don’t get up, the tin cylinder will,” he remarked quite casually to his colleague.
Water was admitted, then air. The lid fell back, and Goodhart made his escape. At this point Destiny, the unknown and the unknowable, intervened. It reversed the order of affairs that man had so carefully planned. Goodhart was flung back against the structure and killed outright. At the same moment the officer who was to retire into the submarine was shot upward and reached the surface. According to the official account in the London Gazette, “Commander Goodhart displayed extreme and heroic daring, and thoroughly realized the forlorn nature of his act.” This does not go quite far enough. Had it not been for the dead man’s attempt the instructions which were of such vital consequence to the imprisoned men would never have reached the rescuers. In due course fresh air, food, and water were sent to those below by methods private to the printed page. That night the survivors slept on shore as a slight compensation for their long and awful vigil.
In October 1916 the Danish submarine Dykkeren met with a somewhat similar mishap, although the cause of her sudden disappearance was a collision with a Norwegian steamer in the Sound. Divers entrusted with the salvage operations hammered messages of good cheer in the Morse code on the side of the sunken boat, to which the prisoners promptly responded. The commander alone lost his life. He was found dead in the conning-tower.
The pirate chiefs of Germany did not have it all their own way even when the absence of Allied patrol vessels, mines, and anti-submarine nets rendered existence a little less worrying than was usually the case with these pariahs of the deep. Lieutenant-Commander Schneider, who had won renown in the Fatherland as an instrument of the ‘Blockade,’ was swept overboard from his conning-tower while his craft was travelling awash. When his body was recovered life was extinct. It was consigned to the deep, whither the Commander had sent many another during his career as a pirate. Some men from a U-boat in the Baltic were investigating the papers of a schooner, when a German cruiser put in an appearance. Being uncertain whether the submarine was a foreigner or not, as no colours were displayed, the man-of-war ventured too close, and crashed into the bow of the stationary vessel. Both U-boat and cruiser were compelled to retire for repairs. Off Norway a German submarine mistook another of her own nationality for a British representative of the underseas and promptly torpedoed her.