Said an officer to me, "The future of the submarine? Why, sir, the submarine is the only war vessel that's going to have a future!"
The submarines are moved alongside.
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 gray 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 strange, incomprehensible, and out of place in the motion of the storm.
And then 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.
Submarines are going out to-night.
"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. Branch 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 aren't our subs sometimes mistaken for Germans?"
"Oh, yes," was the calm answer.