What pen could describe this drama in all its fullness?
On the Gambetta, sailors and officers scanned this sea that was almost too bright; they had seen it raging or seething with billows, or tormented by the wind, or calmer than a sleeping eyelid. It was the ninth month! Flashes of lightning dazzled their eyes, and they moved, like the watchers on the Waldeck-Rousseau, in a confusion of gleams and darkness. It was the two hundredth night! They were weary. They had waited so long, they no longer expected anything. Their eyes met only illusion.
The submarine lay in wait in the bosom of the waves. It knew that some time or other its wonderful prey would pass within range of its torpedo. Through the lens of the periscope its commander saw the luminous circle where the moon danced, the surface of the mirrored water, and the phantoms which move in a night at sea. He heard on the submerged hull the lapping of the dark waves. All the sailors at their posts watched the gesture of his hand and the sound of his voice.
Suddenly this man’s heart began to beat as if it would burst. God of death, you were speaking in his ear! He had just seen in the funnel of his periscope two masts and four stacks. She rose in the midst of the lightning flashes, a phantom. Tense and still, the man asked himself if the vision would approach, or would vanish as on the preceding nights. She approached. She came, a vagabond, predestined, without knowing that a demon was plotting her death. With closed lips and moist hands, this man prepared his words. Twenty-five men watched him as if he were a destroying angel.
At the given moment he said: “Fire!”
The torpedo left the submarine like a breath in the water and as silently. For a few seconds, a few endless seconds, it rushed through the echoless water. Two flashes, three flashes, gleamed in the sky; the lookouts on the Gambetta covered their faces with their hands. They did not suspect that this moment, which followed so many other moments, held in it the last breath they would draw.
Then a dull sound behind her made the cruiser tremble. She was seized with a sudden fever, and each of her metal plates resounded. Death spread through her limbs and muscles. In through a breach in her very heart rushed the dark water, leaped and broke everything before it. What happened then?
I do not know. I do not yet know. But some of the messages make it possible to imagine the details of the horror.
Filled with water on her wounded side, the Gambetta, lurched toward her sea grave, and the sailors who were not killed at once thrust out their arms to save themselves. Everything slid around them. To stand upright they had to lean over; their hands had to serve them for eyes, for darkness enveloped the cruiser. Naked and silent they rushed on toward the deck, but the slanting companion ways were now as perpendicular as walls. How many unfortunates perished in their suddenly interrupted sleep, without realizing that their ship was going down for the last time?