"Oh, I've got to give a bearing the once over, and then I've got to write a bunch of letters."
"Wouldn't you like to come with us?" said the first speaker, pausing over a steaming dish of breakfast porridge. "Be mighty glad to take you."
"Indeed I would," I replied with joy in my heart. "All my life long I have wanted to take a trip in a submarine."
"That's fine! We'll get you some dungarees. Can't fool round a submarine in good clothes." The whole table began to take a friendly interest, and a dispute arose as to whose clothes would best fit me. I am a large person. "Give him my extra set, they're on the side of my locker." "Don't you want a cap or something?" "Hey, that's too small, wait and I'll get Tom's coat." "Try these on." They are a wonderful lot, the submarine officers.
I felt frightfully submarinish in my outfit. We must have made a picturesque group. The captain led off, wearing a tattered, battered, old uniform of Annapolis days, I followed wearing an old Navy cap jammed on the side of my head and a suit of newly laundered dungarees; the second officer brought up the rear; his outfit consisted of dungaree trousers, a kind of aviator's waistcoat, and an old cloth cap.
The submarines were moored close by the side of the mother ship, a double doorway in the wall of the machine shop on the lower deck opening directly upon them. A narrow runway connected the nearest vessel with the sill of this aperture, and mere planks led from one superstructure to another. The day, first real day after weeks of rain, was soft and clear, great low masses of vapour, neither mist nor cloud, but something of both, swept down the long bay on the wings of the wind from the clean, sweet-smelling sea; the sun shone like ancient silver. Little fretful waves of water clear as the water of a spring coursed down the alley ways between the submarines; gulls, piping and barking, whirled like snow flakes overhead. I crossed to one grey alligatorish superstructure, looked down a narrow circular hatch at whose floor I could see the captain waiting for my coming, grasped the steel rings of a narrow ladder, and descended into the submarine. The first impression was of being surrounded by tremendous, almost incredible complexity. A bewildering and intricate mass of delicate mechanical contrivances, valves, stop cocks, wheels, chains, shining pipes, ratchets, faucets, oil-cups, rods, gauges. Second impression, bright cleanliness, shining brass, gleams of steely radiance, stainless walls of white enamel paint. Third impression, size; there was much more room than I had expected. Of course everything is to be seen by floods of steady electric light, since practically no daylight filters down through an open hatchway.
"This," said the captain, "is the control room. Notice the two depth gauges, two in case one gets out of order. That thick tube with a brass thread coiled about it is a periscope, and it's a peach! It's of the 'housing' kind and winds up and down along that screw. The thread prevents any leak of water. In here," we went through a lateral compartment with a steel door, thick as that of a small safe, "is a space where wee eat, sleep and live; our cook stove is that gadget in the corner. We don't do much cooking when we're running submerged; in here," we passed another stout partition, "is our Diesel engine, and our dynamos. Up forward is another living space which technically belongs to the officers, and the torpedo room." He took me along. "Now you've seen it all. A fat steel cigar, divided into various compartments and cram jammed full of shining machinery. Of course, there's no privacy, whatsoever. (Readers will have to guess what is occasionally used for the phonograph table.) Our space is so limited that designers will spend a year arguing where to put an object no bigger than a soap box. We get on very well however. Every crew gets used to its boat; the men get used to each other. They like the life; you couldn't drag them back to surface vessels. An ideal submarine crew works like a perfect machine. When we go out you'll see that we give our orders by Klaxon. There's too much noise for the voice. Suppose I had popped up on the surface right under the very nose of one of those destroyer brutes. She might start to ram me; in which case I might not have time to make recognition signals and would have to take my choice between getting rammed or depth bombed. I decide to submerge, push a button, the Klaxon gives a yell, and every man does automatically what he has been trained to do. A floods the tanks, B stands by the dynamos, C watches the depth gauges and so on. That's what we call a crash dive."
"Over at the destroyer base," I said, "they told me that the Germans were having trouble because of lack of trained crews."
"You can just bet they are," said the captain. "Must have lost several boats that way. Can't monkey with these boats; if somebody pulls a fool stunt—Good Night!" He opened a gold watch and closed it again with a click. "Nine o'clock, just time to shove off. Come up on the bridge until we get out in the bay."
I climbed the narrow ladder again and crept along the superstructure to the bridge which rose for all the world like a little grey steel pulpit. One has to be reasonably sure-footed. It was curious to emerge from the electric lighted marvel to the sunlight of the bay, to the view of the wild mountains descending to the clear sea. The captain gave his orders. Faint, vague noises rose out of the hatchway; sailors standing at various points along the superstructure cast off the mooring ropes and took in bumpers shaped like monstrous sausages of cord which had protected one bulging hull from another; the submarine went ahead solemnly as a planet. Friendly faces leaned over the rail of the mother ship high above.