On the night of my arrival, once dinner was over, I went on deck and looked down through the rain at the submarines moored alongside. They lay close by, one beside the other, in a pool of radiance cast by a number of electric lights hanging over each open hatchway. Beyond this pool lay the rain and the dark; within it, their sides awash in the clear green water of the bay, their grey bridges and rust-stained superstructures shining in the rain, lay the strange, bulging, crocodilian shapes of steel. There was something unearthly, something not of this world or time in the picture; I might have been looking at invaders of the sleeping earth. The wind swept past in great booming salvoes; rain fell in sloping, liquid rods through the brilliancy of electric lamps burning with a steadiness that had something in it of strange, incomprehensible and out of place in the motion and hullabaloo of the storm. And then, too, a hand appeared on the topmost rung of the nearer ladder, and a bulky sailor, a very human sailor in very human dungarees, poked his head out of the aperture, surveyed the inhospitable night, and disappeared.
"He's on Branch's boat. They're going out to-night," said the officer who was guiding me about.
"To-night? How on earth will he ever find his way to the open sea?"
"Knows the bay like a book. However, if the weather gets any worse, I doubt if the captain will let him go. George will be wild if they don't let him out. Somebody has just reported wreckage off the coast, so there must be a Hun round."
"But are not our subs sometimes mistaken for Germans?"
"Oh, yes," was the calm answer.
I thought of that ominous phrase I had noted in the British records "failed to report," and I remembered the stolid British captain who had said to me, speaking of submarines, "Sometimes nobody knows just what happened. Out there in the deep water, whatever happens, happens in a hurry." My guide and I went below to the officers' corridor. Now and then, through the quiet, a mandolin or guitar could be heard far off twanging some sentimental island ditty, and beneath these sweeter sounds lay a monotonous mechanical humming.
"What's that sound?" I asked.
"That's the Filipino mess boys having a little festino in their quarters. The humming? Oh, that's the mother-ship's dynamos charging the batteries of Branch's boat. Saves running on the surface."
My guide knocked at a door. Within his tidy, little room, the captain who was to go out on patrol was packing the personal belongings he needed on the trip.