However, it is time I went on with the doings of our own boats. Human beings are so much more important in war than are machines, that it is a temptation to describe them for preference. I would like to be able to talk about the submarine seamen also, but there is no ground for comparison between our own men and the German machine-made U-boat hand. One thinks of the German men as just things that opened or closed valves when barked at, and who never took any interest in what was going on outside their particular stations, or in what the boat was doing. Our sailors are—well, to put it "socially," they seem to belong more to the middle than the lower class. They are certainly not machine-made or dull, and they are not reluctant to act according to their own judgment in the absence of an officer's orders.

During the war our submarines sank 54 enemy warships and 274 other vessels. These figures do not, of course, include the many warships which were damaged but which were got back into harbour, although they include the U-boats which our submarines destroyed. German ships are very well subdivided in compartments and take a lot of killing. Certainly on a modern war-vessel one torpedo-hit is very little use; it takes about four to make certain of sinking her. The Moltke (battle-cruiser) was hit with one torpedo forward in the Baltic by Commander Laurence, and again off Hiorn's Reef by Lieutenant Allen (right aft this time); on each occasion she got home safely. Our own light cruiser Falmouth had to receive four torpedoes in succession before she sank. The Prinz Adalbert was torpedoed by Commander Horton in the Baltic off Cape Kola and returned safely to Kiel (she could not take a hint, however, and after a long interval for repair she went east again and met Commander Goodheart of "E 8," who sank her). Commander Laurence in "J 1" hit the Kronprinz and Grosser Kurfurst (battleships) in the North Sea, but both were got home safely. Our later submarines were fitted with larger torpedoes and tubes, but the boats fitted with eighteen-inch torpedoes made up the larger part of our flotillas, and it was realised by both our own and the enemy submarines that it took several hits with the smaller-size weapon to finish off a large ship. Perhaps the clearest case on record is that of the Marlborough, the ship being hit by a torpedo at the Jutland battle and remaining in the line at the Fleet speed and continuing her firing as if she had never been touched. Older ships, as both sides found to their cost, were much more vulnerable. Probably the Turkish ships were the easiest of all to put down, as it is doubtful if their fatalistic officers troubled to keep the watertight doors closed.

It must be remembered that there is all the difference in the world between a practice and a war attack. The war attack is usually unexpected, and is done under conditions of light and weather which make things chancy, to say the least of it. In a practice attack an officer can afterwards usually plot on the chart for you every movement his boat and the enemy made, and give reasons for all orders he gave. After a war attack he would probably only be able to remember clearly such things as the periscope hoisting gear giving trouble and the hydroplane men appearing to be unaccountably deaf. I have mixed up several boats' attacks in the following description, and it would not be far wrong as an account of more.

II

The mist closed in in swirling clouds that came along the calm water in lines a few hundred yards apart. One moment through the periscope the captain of the L-boat could see across the yellow-green sea a band of fog crossing his bows—the next, he could see nothing but the ripples that spread and vanished astern a few feet from the top prism of the instrument. It had been a poor visibility day since dawn, and now it looked like being thick weather till dark. He called to the first lieutenant and gave an order. The hydroplane wheels whirred and the boat tilted up and climbed to the accompaniment of sighs and roars, as a couple of external tanks were partly blown. The captain looked down as he climbed the conning-tower ladder: "Slow ahead, port motor—put a charge on starboard—stop blowing." He threw back the lid and met the clammy touch of wet fog on his face. The boat was moving slowly east through a calm sea with only her conning-tower and guns above water, while a white line of foam running forward traced where her deck superstructure ran a few inches below the surface. If she had been on patrol anywhere but to the west of the Vyl Lightship the captain would have taken her to seventy feet and kept a hydrophone watch, but that billet is one that marks the end of a German swept channel, and he wanted to watch from above for the first sign of the fog clearing. He sat on the conning-tower lip, his sea-booted legs resting on the third ladder-rung, and his head twisting this way and that as he stared at the white wall of mist that was so close to him. He had sat there barely a minute, and the booming roar of the big charging engine had just begun sounding up the conning-tower when he slid forward and stood on the ladder with his head and shoulders only exposed; he leaned out to starboard trying to catch again the faint note of a syren that he had felt rather than heard through the note of his own engine. Then something showed dark through the fog, a grey blur with a line of foam below, and the L-boat's lid clanged down, and through her hull rang the startling, insistent blare of the electric alarm. The engine stopped, the port motor woke to full speed, and the control-room was alive with sound and rapid movement. She inclined down by the bow as the captain's boots appeared down the ladder, and as he jumped to the deck his hasty glance at the gauge showed her to be already at twelve feet. But twelve feet by gauge means a conning-tower top still exposed, and as the tanks filled and the internal noises died down a sound could be heard to starboard—a noise of high-speed engines that swelled till it seemed that every second would bring the crash and roar of water each man could imagine so clearly. The gauge-needle checked at fifteen, then swung rapidly up to thirty; the faces watching it relaxed slightly—for the noise swelling through the boat told of destroyers, and destroyers are shallow-draught vessels. The boat still raced on down, with the gauge jerking round through 60-70-80…. "Hold her up, now—back to seventy, coxswain"; the angle changed swiftly to "bow-up" as the spinning wheels reversed and the boat checked at eighty-five; a pump began to stamp and hammer as it drove out the water from a midship tank, and as the trim settled, the big main motors were steadily eased back to "dead slow." The first lieutenant looked up from the gauge and spoke over his shoulder to the captain. "I made it twelve seconds to twenty feet, sir; what was it that passed?"

"You're a cheery optimist with your twelve seconds. Your watch is stopped, Number One. It's destroyers, and they didn't give us much room either."

"Then d'you mean a fleet?"

"I mean I'm coming up to look in a quarter of an hour. I believe if it wasn't foggy I'd see them on the horizon now; that was a screening force that put us down. Here comes another."

Again the sound of a turbine-driven vessel came from the starboard hand. It swelled to its maximum and then suddenly died to a murmur, passing away to port. Twice more the warning came, and then fell a silence of just five minutes by the captain's wrist-watch. "Bring her up—twenty-four feet—and don't break surface now." He turned round to the periscope as the boat climbed and tested the raising gear, making the big shining tube move a few feet up and down. As the gauge moved to the 30 mark, the periscope rose with a rush, and he bowed his head to the eye-piece in readiness for an early glimpse of the surface world. At twenty-five feet a grunt of satisfaction and a quick swing round of the periscope spoke of his relief at being able to see at all; the fog was clearing and he was diving across one of the long lanes made in the mist by the rising wind. He turned the boat through eight points to keep her in the lane, turning up-wind to meet the clearer visibility that was coming. As he steadied on the new course he stiffened in his crouching attitude, staring to port: "Action Stations—evolution now—get a move on."

The clatter and excitement of flooding tubes and opening doors lasted hardly sixty seconds, but it was punctuated by several sentences from the periscope position such as: "Are you going to get those tubes ready?" and less plaintively, "How much something longer now?" The captain's thoughts were out in the mist above him where his range of view was bounded on two sides by faintly seen grey masses that rushed past him at close range. The reports of, "Ready, bow tubes"; "beam tubes ready, sir," came through the voice-pipes as the first lieutenant hurried from forward, panting from his exertions. "All ready, sir," he said, and paused for breath. "What is it, sir; can you see?…" The captain interrupted: "Yes," he said, "blinkin' mist and battle-cruisers. Port beam, stand by; port beam, fire! Starboard twenty-five; stop port, full speed starboard; look out forrard, Number One, I'm going to let go the lot."