Transcriber’s Note: The cover of this eBook was created by the Transcriber by adding text to the Frontispiece of the original book. The cover and added text are in the Public Domain.

“Whose crew abandoned ship and then all stood up and cursed us.”

SUBMARINE
AND
ANTI-SUBMARINE

BY
HENRY NEWBOLT

AUTHOR OF ‘THE BOOK OF THE HAPPY WARRIOR,’ ‘TALES OF THE GREAT WAR,’ ETC.

WITH A COLOURED FRONTISPIECE AND 20 FULL-PAGE
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY NORMAN WILKINSON, R.I.

NEW YORK:
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO.

FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS
1919

TO
JOHN BUCHAN

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

SUBMARINE
AND ANTI-SUBMARINE

CHAPTER I
THE SPIRIT OF SUBMARINE WAR

It is probable that a good deal of the information contained in this book will be new to the public; for it has been collected under favour of exceptional circumstances. But the reader will gain little if he cannot contribute something on his side—if he cannot share with the writer certain fundamental beliefs. The first of these is that every nation has a spirit of its own—a spirit which is the mainspring of national action. It is more than a mechanical spring; for it not only supplies a motive force, but determines the moral character of the action which results. When we read the history of nations, and especially the history of their explorations, wars, and revolutions, we soon recognise the spirit of each, and learn to expect its appearance in every moment of crisis or endurance. If it duly appears, our impression is confirmed; if it fails on any occasion, we are disappointed. But the disappointments are few—nations may at times surprise us; but, as a rule, they are like themselves. Even when they develop and seem to change, they are apt, under the stress of action, to return to their aboriginal character, and to exhibit it in their old historic fashion. To attempt, then, to give an account of any national struggle, without paying attention to the influence of the characteristic spirit of the country or countries concerned, would be a difficult undertaking, and a mistaken one. Even in a short crisis, a great people will probably display its historic colours, and in a long one it certainly will. To ignore this, to describe national actions without giving a sense of the animating spirit, would be not only a tame and inadequate method; it would lower the value of life itself by making mere prose of what should, by right, partake of the nature of poetry. History cannot often be entirely poetical, or poetry entirely historical. When Homer told the tale of Troy, he did not make prose—or even history—of it. He everywhere infused into it ‘an incomparable ardour’—he made an epic. But Mr. Thomas Hardy wrote history in ‘The Dynasts,’ and made it an epic too. An epic—the common definition tells us—is ‘a theme of action treated in heroic proportions and style.’ ‘The Dynasts’ certainly is that—the struggle is great, the issues are great, the men are great. Even more than their heroic fighting, their speech and manners in the moment of action are such as to show unfailingly by what a distinctive and ever-present spirit national life may be sustained and magnified.

When we come to nearer times, and more familiar events, the same necessity is upon us. What writer of artistic sense, or scientific honesty, would touch, for example, the history of modern Egypt without attempting to understand the character of such men as Gordon and Cromer, and the spirit which (however personal and diverse in its manifestations) they both drew from the nation that sent them forth? Such an understanding would enable the narrator to carry us all with him. For every man of our national birth and breeding would feel, when he was told the story of such heroes, not only their superiority but their likeness to himself. ‘There,’ he would say, ‘but for lack of fortune, or opportunity, or courage, or stature, there goes John Smith.’ It is admiration which helps us to feel that, and a mean spirit which conceals it from us.

Further, it is my belief that the historian who would deal adequately with our present War must have an even wider understanding and sympathy. He must have a broad enough view to recognise all the various motives which impelled us, section by section, to enter the struggle; and a deep enough insight to perceive that, below all motives which can be expressed or debated in words, there was an instinct—a spontaneous emotion—which irresistibly stirred the majority of our people, and made us a practically unanimous nation. He must be able to see that this unanimity was no freak—no sudden outburst—but the natural fulfilment of a strong and long-trained national character; and he must trace, with grateful admiration, the national service contributed by many diverse classes, and by a large number of distinguished men—the leaders and patterns of the rest. However scientific the historian’s judgments, and however restrained his style, it must be impossible for any reader to miss the real point of the narrative—the greatness of the free nations, and the nobility of their heroes. Belgians, Serbians, French, Italians, Americans—all must hear their great men honoured, and their corporate virtues generously recognised. We Britons, for our own part, must feel, at every mention of the names of our champions, the fine sting of the invisible fire with which true glory burns the heart. It must never be possible to read, without an uplifting of the spirit, the achievements of commanders like Smith-Dorrien, Haig, and Birdwood—Plumer and Rawlinson, Allenby and Byng, and Horne; or the fate of Cradock and Kitchener; or the sea-fights of Beatty and Sturdee, of Keyes and Tyrwhitt. It must be clear, from the beginning to the end of the vast record, that the British blood has equalled and surpassed its ancient fame—that in every rank the old virtues of courage, coolness, and endurance, of ordered energy and human kindliness, have been, not the occasional distinction, but the common characteristics of our men. Look where you will on the scene of war, you must be shown ‘a theme of action treated in heroic proportions and style’—fit, at least, to indicate the greatness of the national spirit.

In this book our concern is with the war at sea, and with a part only of that gigantic effort. But of this part, every word that has been said holds good. The submarine and anti-submarine campaign is not a series of minor operations. Its history is not a mere episode among chapters of greater significance. On the contrary, the fate of Britain, and the fate of Germany, were speedily seen to be staked upon the issue of this particular contest, as they have been staked upon no other part of the world-wide struggle. The entrance of America into the fellowship of nations was involved in it. The future of civilisation depends upon it. Moreover, in its course the British seaman has shown himself possessed, in the highest degree, of the qualities by which his forefathers conquered and kept our naval predominance; and finally, it is in the submarine war that we see most sharply the contrast of the spirit of chivalry with the spirit of savagery; of the law of humanity with the lawlessness of brute force; of the possible redemption of social life with its irretrievable degradation. It is a subject worthy, thrice over, of treatment in a national epic.

The present book is not an epic—it is not a poetical work at all. Half of it is mere technical detail; and the rest plain fact plainly told. But it is far from my intention that the sense of admiration for national heroes, or the recognition of national greatness, shall be absent from it. I have used few epithets; for they seemed to me needless and inadequate. The stories of the voyages and adventures of our own submarines, and of the fighting of our men against the pirates, need no heightening. They need only to be read and understood; and it is chiefly with a view to their better understanding, that the reader is offered a certain amount of comment and description in the earlier chapters. But a suggestion or two may be made here, at the very beginning, in the hope of starting a train of thought which may accompany the narrative with a whisper of historic continuity—a reminder that as with men, so with nations—none becomes utterly base on a sudden, or utterly heroic. Their vices and their virtues are the harvesting of their past.

Let us take a single virtue, like courage, which is common to all nations but shows under a different form or colour in each, and so becomes a national characteristic, plainly visible in action. A historical study of British courage would, I believe, show two facts: first, that the peculiar quality of it has persisted for centuries; and, secondly, that if our people have changed at all in this respect, they have only changed in the direction of greater uniformity. Once they had two kinds of courage in war; now they have but one, and that by far the better one. In the old days, among the cool and determined captains of our race, there were always a certain number of hot heads—‘men of courage without discipline, of enthusiasm without reason, of will without science.’ The best of them, like Sir Richard Grenville, had the luck to die conspicuously, in their great moments, and so to leave us an example of the spirit that defies odds, and sets men above the fear of death. The rest led their men into mad adventures, where they perished to the injury of their cause. Most Englishmen can understand the pure joy of onset, the freedom of the moment when everything has been given for the hope of winning one objective; but it has been the more characteristic way of our people—at any rate for the last five centuries—to double courage with coolness, and fight not only their hardest but their best. From Cressy to Waterloo, and from Mons to Arras, we have won many battles by standing steadily and shooting the attack to pieces. Charges our men have made, but under discipline and in the nick of opportunity. The Black Prince charged fiercely at Poitiers; but it was only when he had broken three attacks, and saw his chance to win. The charge of the Worcesters at Gheluvelt, the charge of the Oxfords at Nonneboschen, and a hundred more like them, were as desperate as any ‘ride of death’; but they were neither reckless nor useless, they were simply the heroic move to win the game. Still more is this the rule at sea. Beatty at Jutland, like Nelson and Collingwood at Trafalgar, played an opening in which he personally risked annihilation; but nothing was ever done with greater coolness, or more admirable science. The perfect picture of all courage is, perhaps, a great British war-ship in action; for there you have, among a thousand men, one spirit of elation, of fearlessness, of determination, backed by trained skill and a self-forgetful desire to apply it in the critical moment. The submarine, and the anti-submarine ship, trawler or patrol-boat are, on a smaller scale, equally perfect examples; for there is no hour of their cruise when they are not within call of the critical moment. In the trenches, in the air, in the fleet, you will see the same steady skilful British courage almost universally exemplified. But in the submarine war, the discipline needed is even more absolute, the skill even more delicate, the ardour even more continuous and self-forgetful; and all these demands are even more completely fulfilled.

This is fortunate, and doubly fortunate; for the submarine war has proved to be the main battlefield of our spiritual crusade, as well as a vital military campaign. The men engaged in it have been marked out by fate, as our champions in the contest of ideals. They are the patterns and defenders of human nature in war, against those who preach and practise barbarism. Here—and nowhere else so clearly as here—the world has seen the death struggle between the two spirits now contending for the future of mankind. Between the old chivalry, and the new savagery, there can be no more truce; one of the two must go under, and the barbarians knew it when they cried Weltmacht oder Niedergang. Of the spirit of the German nation it is not necessary to say much. Everything that could be charged against them has been already proved, by their own words and actions. They have sunk without warning women and children, doctors and nurses, neutrals and wounded men, not by tens or hundreds but by thousands. They have publicly rejoiced over these murders with medals and flags, with songs and school holidays. They have not only broken the rules of international law; they have with unparalleled cruelty, after sinking even neutral ships, shot and drowned the crews in open boats, that they might leave no trace of their crimes. The men who have done—and are still doing—these things have courage of a kind. They face danger and hardship to a certain point, though, by their own account, in the last extreme they fail to show the dignity and sanity with which our own men meet death. But their peculiar defect is not one of nerve, but of spirit. They lack that instinct which, with all civilised races, intervenes, even in the most violent moment of conflict or desperation, and reminds the combatant that there are blows which it is not lawful to strike in any circumstances whatever. This instinct—the religion of all chivalrous peoples—is connected by some with humanity, by some with courtesy, by ourselves with sport. In this matter we are all in the right. The savage in conflict thinks of nothing but his own violent will; the civilised and the chivalrous are always conscious of the fact that there are other rights in the world beside their own. The humane man forbears his enemy; the courteous man respects him, as one with rights like his own; the man with the instinct of sport knows that he must not snatch success by destroying the very game itself. The civilised nation will not hack its way to victory through the ruins of human life. It will be restrained, if by no other consideration, yet at least by the recollection that it is but one member of a human fellowship, and that the greatness of a part can never be achieved by the corruption of the whole.

The German nature is not only devoid of this instinct, it is roused to fury by the thought of it. Any act, however cruel and barbarous, if only it tends to defeat the enemies of Germany, is a good deed, a brave act, and to be commended. The German general who lays this down is supported by the German professor who adds: ‘The spontaneous and elementary hatred towards England is rooted in the deepest depths of our own being—there, where considerations of reason do not count, where the irrational, the instinct, alone dominates. We hate in the English the hostile principle of our innermost and highest nature. And it is well that we are fully aware of this, because we touch therein the vital meaning of this War.’ Before the end comes, the barbarian will find this hostile principle, and will hate it, in the French, the Italians, the Americans—in the whole fellowship of nations against which he is fighting with savage fury. But, to our satisfaction, he has singled us out first; for, when we hear him, we too are conscious of a spontaneous hatred in the depths of our being; and we see that in this we do ‘touch the vital meaning of this War.’

CHAPTER II
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUBMARINE

Many are the fables which the Germans have done their best to pass off for truth among the spectators of the present War; but not one is more wilfully and demonstrably false, than their account of the origin of the submarine. According to the story which they have endeavoured to spread among the unthinking public in neutral countries, the under-sea boat—the arm with which they claim to have revolutionised naval warfare—is the product of German ingenuity and skill. The French, they say, had merely played with the idea; their submarines were costly toys, dangerous only to those who tried to navigate them. The Americans had shown some promise half a century ago; but having since become a pacifist race of dollar-hunters, they had lost interest in war, and their boats would be found useless in practice. As for the British, the day of their naval power was past; they had spent their time and money upon the mania for big ships, and neglected the more scientific vessel, the submarine, which had made the big ships obsolete in a single year’s campaign. The ship of the future, the U-boat, was the national weapon of Germany alone.

The claim was unjustified; but, so far, it was not—to an uninstructed neutral—obviously unjustified. The Americans were not yet at war; the submarines of France and Britain were hardly ever heard of. Our boats had few targets, and their operations were still further restricted by the rules of international law, which we continued to keep, though our enemies did not. Moreover, whatever our Service did achieve was done secretly; and even our successes were announced so briefly and vaguely as to make no impression. The result was that the Germans were able to make out a plausible title to the ‘command of the sea beneath the surface’; and they even gained a hearing for the other half of their claim, which was unsupported by any evidence whatever. The submarine is not, in its origin, of German invention; the idea of submarine war was not a German idea, nor have Germans contributed anything of value to the long process of experiment and development by which the idea has been made to issue in practical under-water navigation. From beginning to end, the Germans have played their characteristic part. They have been behind their rivals in intelligence; they have relied on imitation of the work of others; on discoveries methodically borrowed and adapted; and when they have had to trust to their own abilities, they have never passed beyond mediocrity. They have shown originality in one direction only—their ruthless disregard of law and humanity. These statements are not the outcome of partisanship, but of a frank study of the facts. They are clearly proved by the history of submarine war.

That history may be said to begin with the second half of the sixteenth century, when the two main principles or aims of submarine war were first set forth—both by English seamen. Happily the records remain. Sir William Monson, one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals, in his famous ‘Naval Tracts,’ suggests that a powerful ship may be sunk much more easily by an under-water shot than by ordinary gunfire. His plan is ‘to place a cannon in the hold of a bark, with her mouth to the side of the ship: the bark shall board, and then to give fire to the cannon that is stowed under water, and they shall both instantly sink: the man that shall execute this stratagem may escape in a small boat hauled the other side of the bark.’

This is the germinal idea from which sprang the submarine mine or torpedo; and the first design for a submarine boat was also produced by the English Navy in the same generation. The author of this was William Bourne, who had served as a gunner under Sir William Monson. His invention is described in his book of ‘Inventions or Devices’ published in 1578, and is remarkable for its proposed method of solving the problem of submersion. This is to be achieved by means of two side-tanks, into which water can be admitted through perforations, and from which it can be blown out again by forcing the inner side of each tank outwards. These false sides are made tight with leather suckers, and moved by winding hand-screws—a crude and inefficient mechanism, but a proof that the problem had been correctly grasped. For a really practical solution of this, and the many other difficulties involved in submarine navigation, the resources of applied science were then hopelessly inadequate. It was not until after more than three hundred years of experiment that inventors were in a position to command a mechanism that would carry out their ideas effectively.

The record of these three centuries of experiment is full of interest; for it shows us a long succession of courageous men taking up, one after another, the same group of scientific problems and bringing them, in spite of all dangers and disasters, gradually nearer to a final solution. Many nations contributed to the work, but especially the British, the American, the Dutch, the French, the Spanish, the Swedish, the Russian, and the Italian. The part played by each of them has been, on the whole, characteristic. The British were the first, as practical seamen, to put forward the original idea, gained from the experience of their rivalry with Spain. They have also succeeded, at the end of the experimental period, in making the best combined use of the results of the long collaboration. A Dutchman built the first practical submarine, and achieved the first successful dive. The Americans have made the greatest number of inventions, and of daring experiments in earlier wars. The French have shown, as a nation, the strongest interest in the idea, and their navy was effectively armed with submarines ten years before that of any other Power. To them, to the Dutch, and to the Italians, the credit belongs of that indispensable invention, the optic tube or periscope. The Swedes and Russians have the great names of Nordenfelt and Drzewiecki to their credit. The Germans alone, among the eight or nine nations interested in the science of naval war, have from first to last contributed almost nothing to the evolution of the submarine. The roll of submarine inventors includes about 175 names, of which no less than 60 belong to the English-speaking peoples, but only six to Germany. Among these six, the name of Bauer is remembered as that of a courageous experimenter, persevering through a career of repeated failures; but neither he, nor any of his fellow countrymen, advanced the common cause by the suggestion of a single idea of value. Finally, when the German Admiralty, after the failure of their own Howaldt boat, decided to borrow the Holland type from America, it was no German, but the Franco-Spanish engineer d’Equevilley, who designed for them the first five U-boats, of which all the later ones are modifications. The English Admiralty were in no such straits. They were only one year before the Germans in adopting the Holland type; but the native genius at their disposal has enabled them to keep ahead of their rivals from that day to this, in the design, efficiency, size, and number of their submarine vessels. And this result is exactly what might have been expected from the history of submarine invention.

The construction of a workable submarine depends upon the discovery and solution of a number of problems, the first five of which may be said to be the problems of—

1. Submersion.
2. Stability.
3. Habitability.
4. Propulsion and Speed.
5. Offensive Action.

If we take these in order, and trace the steps by which the final solution was approached, we shall be able to confirm what has been said about the work contributed by successive inventors.

1. Submersion.—We have seen that for submersion and return to the surface, Bourne had at the very beginning devised the side-tank to which water could be admitted, and from which it could be ‘blown out’ at will. Bushnell, a remarkable inventor of British-American birth, substituted a hand-pump in his boat of 1771, for the mechanism proposed by Bourne. In 1795, Armand-Maizière, a Frenchman, designed a steam submarine vessel to be worked by ‘a number of oars vibrating on the principle of a bird’s wing.’ Of these ‘wings,’ one lot were intended to make the boat submerge. Nothing came of this proposal, and for more than a century tanks and pumps remained the sole means of submersion. In 1893 Haydon, an American, invented a submarine for the peaceful purpose of exploring the ocean bed. Its most important feature was the method of submersion. This was accomplished by means of an interior cylindrical tank, with direct access to the sea, and fitted with two powerfully geared pistons. By simply drawing the pistons in, or pushing them out, the amount of water ballast could be nicely regulated, and the necessity for compressed air or other expellants was avoided. This device would have given great satisfaction to William Bourne, the Elizabethan gunner, whose original idea, after more than two centuries, it carried out successfully. Finally, in 1900, the American inventor, Simon Lake, in his Argonaut II., introduced a new method of diving. For the reduction of the vessel’s floatability he employed the usual tanks; but for ‘travelling’ between the surface and the bottom, he made use of ‘four big hydroplanes, two on each side, that steer the boat either down or up.’ Similar hydroplanes, or horizontal rudders, appeared in the later Holland boats, and are now in common use in all submarine types.

Lake was of British descent, his family having emigrated from Wales to New Jersey; but he owed his first interest in submarine construction, and many of his inventive ideas, to the brilliant French writer, Jules Verne, whose book ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea’ came by chance into his hands when he was a boy ten years old, and made a lasting impression upon him.

2. Stability.—Next to the power of submersion, the most necessary quality in a submarine is that of stability under water. The most obvious method of securing this is by water ballast, which was probably the first means actually employed. Bushnell, in 1771, substituted a heavy weight of lead, as being more economical of space and better suited to the shape of his boat, which resembled a turtle in an upright position. The leaden ballast, being detachable at will, also acted as a safety weight, to be dropped at a moment of extreme urgency. In the Nautilus, built in 1800 by the famous engineer, Robert Fulton, an American of English birth and education, the leaden weight reappeared as a keel, and was entirely effective. The inventor, in a trial at Brest in 1801, dived to a depth of 25 feet, and performed successful evolutions in different directions for over an hour. Bauer, fifty years later, returned to the ballast principle, and used both a water-tank and a safety weight in the same boat. The results were disastrous. His first submarine sank at her first trial in Kiel harbour, and was never refloated. His second was built in England; but this, too, sank, with great loss of life. His third, Le Diable Marin, after several favourable trials at Cronstadt, fouled her propeller in a bed of seaweed, and the releasing of the safety weights only resulted in bringing her bows to the surface. The crew escaped with difficulty, and the vessel then sank.

Three years later, in 1861, Olivier Riou designed two boats, in both of which stability was to be preserved automatically by the device of a double hull. The two cylinders which composed it, one within the other, were not fixed immovably to one another, but were on rollers, so that if the outer hull rolled to the right the inner rolled to the left. By this counterbalancing effect, it was estimated that the stability of the vessel would be absolutely secured; but nothing is recorded of the trials of these boats. The celebrated French inventors, Bourgois and Brun, reintroduced the principle of water-tanks combined with a heavy iron ballast keel. But in 1881, the Rev. W. Garrett, the English designer of the Nordenfelt boats, invented a new automatic mechanism for ensuring stability. This consisted of two vertical rudders with a heavy pendulum weight so attached to them that, if the boat dipped out of the horizontal, the pendulum swung down and gave the rudders an opposite slant which raised the vessel again to a horizontal position. This arrangement, though perfect in theory, in practice developed fatal defects, and subsequent types have all returned to the use of water-tanks, made to compensate, by elaborate but trustworthy mechanism, for every loss or addition of weight.

3. Habitability.—For the habitability of a submarine the prime necessity is a supply of air capable of supporting life during the period of submersion. The first actual constructor of a submarine, Cornelius van Drebbel, of Alkmaar, in Holland, was fully aware of this problem, and claimed to have solved it, not by mechanical but by chemical means. His improved boat, built in England about 1622, carried twelve rowers, besides passengers, among whom King James I. is said to have been included on one occasion, and was successfully navigated for several hours at a depth of ten to fifteen feet. ‘Drebbel conceived,’ says Robert Boyle, in 1662, ‘that ’tis not the whole body of the air, but a certain Quintessence (as Chymists speake) or spirituous part of it that makes it fit for respiration, which being spent, the grosser body or carcase (if I may so call it) of the Air, is unable to cherish the vital flame residing in the heart: so that (for aught I could gather) besides the Mechanical contrivance of his vessel he had a Chymical liquor, which he accounted the chief secret of his Submarine Navigation. For when from time to time, he perceived that the finer and purer part of the Air was consumed or over-clogged by the respiration and steames of those that went in his ship, he would, by unstopping a vessel full of the liquor, speedily restore to the troubled air such a proportion of vital parts as would make it again for a good while fit for Respiration.’

Drebbel, who was a really scientific man, may possibly have discovered this chemical secret. If so, he anticipated by more than 200 years a very important device now in use in all submarines, and in any case he was the originator of the idea. But his son-in-law, a German named Kuffler, who attempted after Drebbel’s death to exploit his submarine inventions, was a man of inferior ability, and either ignorant of the secret or incapable of utilising it. For another century and a half, submarine designers contented themselves with the small supply of air which was carried down at the time of submersion. Even the Turtle—Bushnell’s boat of 1776, which has been described as ‘the first submarine craft which really navigated under serious conditions’—was only built to hold one man with a sufficient supply of air for half an hour’s submersion. This was a bare minimum of habitability, and Fulton, twenty-five years later, found it necessary to equip his Nautilus with a compressed air apparatus. Even with this, the crew of two could only be supplied for one hour. In 1827, the very able French designer, Castera, took out a patent for a submarine life-boat, to which air was to be supplied by a tube from the surface, protected by a float, from which the whole vessel was suspended. The danger here was from the possible entry of water through the funnel, and the boat, though planned with great ingenuity, was never actually tried. Bauer, in 1855, fitted his Diable Marin with large water-tubes, running for thirty feet along the top of the boat and pierced with small holes from which, when desired, a continual rain could be made to fall. This shower-bath had a purifying effect on the vitiated air, but it had obvious disadvantages; and there is no record of its having been put into actual use before the unfortunate vessel sank, as before related. In the same year, a better principle was introduced by Babbage, an English inventor, who designed a naval diving-bell, fitted with three cylinders of compressed air. His method was followed by Bourgois and Brun, whose boats of 1863–5 carried steel reservoirs with compressed air, at a pressure of at least 15 atmospheres. The principle was now established, and was adopted in Holland and Lake boats, and in all subsequent types, with the addition of chemical treatment of the vitiated air.

4. Propulsion.—The various solutions of this problem have naturally followed the successive steps in the development of machinery. Drebbel made use of oars. Bushnell, though he speaks of ‘an oar,’ goes on to describe it as ‘formed upon the principle of the screw—its axis entered the vessel, and being turned one way rowed the vessel forward, but being turned the other way rowed it backward: it was made to be turned by the hand or foot.’ Moreover, he had a similar ‘oar’ placed at the top of the vessel, which helped it to ascend or descend in the water. The conclusion seems unavoidable that to this designer belongs the honour of having invented the screw propeller, and also of having put it into successful operation. Fulton adopted the same method of propeller and hand-winch in his Nautilus; but his huge vessel, the Mute, built in 1814 to carry 100 men, was driven by a silent steam-engine. He died during the trials of this boat, and further experiment with it seems to have been abandoned, possibly owing to the great interest excited by his first war steamer, which was building at the same time. A regrettable set-back was thus caused. For forty years no one experimented with any kind of propulsory engine. Bauer, in 1855, could devise no better method of working his propeller than a system of 7-foot wheels, turned by a pair of men running on a treadmill. At the same moment, however, a more fruitful genius was at work. A French professor, Marié-Davy, designed a submarine in which the propeller was driven by an electro-magnetic engine placed in the stern of the ship, with batteries forward. The idea was a valuable one, with a great future before it, though for the moment it achieved no visible success. A year later, in 1855, the famous British engineer, James Nasmyth, designed a ‘submerged mortar,’ which was in reality a ram of great weight and thickness, capable of being submerged level with the surface, and driven at a speed of over 10 knots by a steam-engine with a single high-pressure boiler. But in spite of the simplicity and power of this boat, it was finally rejected as being neither invisible nor invulnerable to an armed enemy; and in their desire to obtain complete submersion, the French inventors of the next few years—Hubault, Conseil, and Masson—all returned to the hand-winch method of propulsion. Riou, however, in 1861, adopted steam for one of his boats, and electric power for the other; and in 1883 the American engineer, Alstitt, built the first submarine fitted with both steam and electricity. Steam was also used in the Plongeur of Bourgois and Brun, which was completed in the same year.

The American Civil War then gave a great opportunity for practical experiments in torpedo attack; but the difficulty of wholly submerged navigation not having been yet solved, the boats used were not true submarines, but submersibles. Their propulsion was by steam, and their dimensions small. A more ambitious invention was put forward in 1869 by a German, Otto Vogel, whose design was accepted by the Prussian Government. His submersible steamship was to be heavily armed, and was ‘considered the equal of a first-class iron-clad in defensive and offensive powers.’ These powers, however, never came into operation.

Inventors now returned to the designing of true submarines; and after the Frenchman, Constantin, the American, Halstead, and the Russian, Drzewiecki, had all made the best use they could of the hand-winch or the pedal for propulsion, three very interesting attempts were made in 1877–8 to secure a more satisfactory engine. Olivier’s boat, patented in May 1877–8, was to be propelled by the gases generated from the ignition of high explosives, the massed vapours escaping through a tube at the stern. This ingenious method was, however, too dangerous for practical use. Surman’s design of 1878 included a propeller, rotated by compressed air. But the English boat of the same date, Garrett’s Resurgam, was much the most noteworthy of the three, and introduced a method which may in the future be brought to perfection with great results. In this boat, the motive force was steam, and propulsion under water, as well as on the surface, was aimed at and actually attained. In her trials, the vessel showed herself capable of navigating under water for a distance of 12 miles, by getting up a full head of steam in a very powerful boiler, with the aid of a blower, before diving; then by shutting the fire-door and chimney, and utilising the latent heat as long as it would last. When the heat was exhausted, it was, of course, necessary to return to the surface, slow up the fire again and recharge the boiler with water. The vessel was remarkably successful, and had the great merit of showing no track whatever when moving under water. She was lost by an accident, but not until she had impressed Nordenfelt, the Swedish inventor, so strongly that he secured the services of her designer, Garrett, for the building of his own submarine boats. The first of these appeared in 1881.

In the same year were patented Woodhouse’s submarine, driven by compressed air, and Génoud’s, with a gas-engine worked by hydrogen, which is said to have attained a speed of between four and five knots. Blakesley, in 1884, proposed to use steam raised in a fireless boiler heated by a chemical composition. In 1884, too, Drzewiecki produced the fourth of his ingenious little boats, driven this time not by pedals but by an electric motor. His example was followed by Tuck of San Francisco shortly afterwards, and by Campbell and Ash in their Nautilus, which in 1886 underwent very successful trials in the West Indian Docks at Tilbury, near London. In 1886 D’Allest, the celebrated French engineer, designed a submarine fitted with a petrol combustion engine. But the question of propulsion may be said to have been finally settled, within a few months after this, in favour of the electro-motor. For Gustave Zédé’s famous Gymnote, which was actually put on the stocks in April 1887, attained in practice a surface speed of 10 knots, and a maximum of 7 to 8 under water. This success saved future designers the trouble of further experiments with ingenious futilities.

5. Offensive Action.—We have so far been considering the development of the submarine as a vessel navigable under water, without reference to the purpose of offence in war. But this purpose was from the first in view; and with almost all the inventors recorded, it formed the main incentive of their efforts. The evolution of the submarine weapon has been much simpler, and more regular, than that of the vessel which was to use it; but it has been equally wonderful, and the history of it is equally instructive. Briefly, the French, in this department as in the other, have shown the most imaginative enthusiasm, the Americans the greatest determination to achieve results—even with crude or dangerous means—while the English have to their credit both the earliest attempts in actual war, and the final achievement of the automobile torpedo. Of the Germans, as before, we must record that they have contributed nothing of any scientific value.

Sir William Monson’s device of a bark, with an under-water cannon and an accompanying boat was soon developed by the English navy into the more practicable mine, self-contained and floating, to be towed by boat or submarine. In January, 1626, the King gave a warrant to the Master of the Ordnance, ‘for the making of divers water-mines, water-petards, and boates to goe under water.’ In June of the same year, the Duke of Buckingham, then commanding the naval expedition for the relief of La Rochelle, issued a warrant ‘for the delivery of 50 water-mynes, 290 water-petards, and 2 boates to conduct them under water.’ Pepys in his ‘Diary’ for March 14, 1662, mentions a proposal by Kuffler of an ‘engine to blow up ships.’ He adds, ‘We doubted not the matter of fact, it being tried in Cromwell’s time, but the safety of carrying them in ships;’ and probably this distrust of Drebbel’s German subordinate proved to be justified, for nothing more is heard of the design. The attempt referred to as made ‘in Cromwell’s time’ may have been Prince Rupert’s attack on Blake’s flagship, the Leopard, in 1650. The engine then used was not a submarine one but an infernal machine, concealed in an oil-barrel, brought alongside in a shore boat by men disguised as Portuguese, and intended to be hoisted on board the ship and then fired by a trigger and string. A more ingenious ‘ship-destroying engine’ was devised by the Marquess of Worcester in 1655. This was evidently a clock-machine, for it might be affixed to a ship either inside, by stealth, or outside by a diver, ‘and at an appointed minute, though a week after, either day or night, it shall infallibly sink that ship.’

The clock machine was actually first tried in action in 1776 by Bushnell, or rather by Sergeant Lee, whom he employed to work his Turtle for him. The attack by this submarine upon the Eagle, a British 64-gun ship lying in the Hudson River, was very nearly successful. The Turtle reached the enemy’s stern unobserved, carrying a mine or magazine of 150 lbs. of powder, and provided with a detachable wood-screw which was to be turned until it bit firmly on the ship’s side. The mine was then to be attached to it, and the clockwork set going. The wood-screw, however, bit upon some iron fittings instead of wood, and failed to hold; the tide also was too strong for Lee, who had to work the wood-screw and the propeller at the same time. He came to the surface, was chased by a guard-boat, and dived again, abandoning his torpedo, which drifted and blew up harmlessly when the clockwork ran down. Lee escaped, but the Turtle was soon afterwards caught and sunk by the British. Bushnell himself, in the following year, attacked the Cerberus with a ‘machine’ consisting of a trigger-mine towed by a whale-boat. He was detected, and his mine captured by a British schooner, the crew of which, after hauling the machine on deck, accidentally exploded it themselves, three out of the four of them being killed.

In 1802 Fulton’s Nautilus, in her trials at Brest, succeeded in blowing up a large boat in the harbour. In 1814 his submersible, the Mute, was armed with ‘columbiads,’ or immensely strong under-water guns, which had previously been tried with success on an old hulk. Similar guns were tried nearly fifty years later by the Spanish submarine designer Monturiol. But the offensive weapon of the period was the mine, and the ingenuity of inventors was chiefly directed to methods of affixing it to the side or bottom of the ship to be destroyed. One of these was the use of long gloves of leather or rubber, protruding from the interior of the submarine, invented by Castera in 1827, and adopted by Bauer, Drzewiecki, and Garrett in succession. But the device was both unhandy and dangerous; there would often be great difficulty in manœuvring the boat into a position in which the gloves would be available, and they could not be made thick enough to withstand the pressure of any depth of water. Practical military instinct demanded a method of launching the mine or torpedo against the target, and the first attempts were made by placing a trigger-mine at the end of a spar carried by the nose of the attacking boat. In October, 1863, during the American Civil War, the forts of Charleston were in danger from the accurate fire of the Federal battleship Ironsides, and Lieut. Glassell was ordered to attack her in the submarine David. He had no difficulty in getting near his enemy and exploding his torpedo, but he had misjudged his distance, and only succeeded in deluging the Ironsides with a column of water. The submarine was herself severely injured by the explosion and had to be abandoned. A second David, commanded by Lieut. Dixon, in February, 1864, attacked the Housatonic, off the same harbour, and in spite of the greatest vigilance on the part of Admiral Dahlgren’s officers, succeeded in reaching the side of the battleship, where she lay for the space of a minute making sure of her contact. The mine was then fired: the Housatonic rose on a great wave, listed heavily, and sank at once. The David, too, disappeared, and it was found three years afterwards that she had been irresistibly sucked into the hole made in her enemy’s side. After this, experiments were made with drifting and towing mines, and with buoyant mines to be released at a depth below the enemy’s keel; but by 1868 the invention of the automobile torpedo by the English engineer, Whitehead, of Fiume, solved the problem of the submarine offensive in the most sudden and conclusive manner.

The Torpedo.—Whitehead’s success arose out of the failure of an enterprising Austrian officer, Captain Lupuis, who had been trying to steer a small fireship along the surface of the water by means of ropes from a fixed base either on shore or in a parent ship. The plan was a crude one and was rejected by the Austrian naval authorities; it was then entrusted to Whitehead, who found it incapable of any practical realisation. He was, however, impressed with Lupuis’ belief in the value of a weapon which could be operated from a distance, and though he failed in designing a controllable vessel, he conceived the idea of an automobile torpedo, and, after two years’ work, constructed it in a practical form. It has been spoken of as ‘the only invention that was perfect when devised,’ and it certainly came very near perfection at the first attempt, but it was erratic and could not be made to keep its depth. In 1868, however, Whitehead invented the ‘balance-chamber,’ which remedied these defects, and brought two finished torpedoes to England for trial. They were fired by compressed air from a submerged tube, and at once proved capable of averaging 7½ to 8½ knots up to 600 yards and of striking a ship under way up to 200 yards. The target, an old corvette in the Medway, was sunk on to the mud by the first shot, at 136 yards, and immediately after the trials the British Government bought the secret, and other rights. Imitations were, of course, soon attempted in other countries, and a type, called the Schwartzkopf, was for some years manufactured in Berlin and used in the German and Spanish navies; it was also tried by the Italians and Japanese, but it failed in the end to hold its own against the Whitehead.

The automobile torpedo was at first used only for the armament of ordinary war-ships; it was not until 1879 that an American engineer named Mortensen designed a submarine with a torpedo-tube in the bows. His example was followed by Berkeley and Hotchkiss in 1880, by Garrett in his first Nordenfelt boat of 1881, and by Woodhouse and by Lagane in the same year. Even after this Drzewiecki, Tuck, and D’Allest designed their submarines without torpedo-tubes, but they were, in fact, indispensable, and the use of the Whitehead torpedo has been for the last twenty years assumed as the main function of all submarines designed for war.

The Submarine in War.—The difficulties of construction, propulsion, and armament having now been solved, the submarine at last took its place among the types of war-ships in the annual lists. From the first England and France held a marked lead, and in Brassey’s Naval Annual for 1914 the submarine forces of the chief naval Powers were given as follows:—Great Britain, 76 vessels built and 20 ordered; France, 70 and 23; the U.S.A., 29 and 31; Germany, 27 and 12. The technical progress of the four services was probably more equal than their merely numerical strength; but it was not altogether equal, as may be seen by a brief comparison of the development of the British and German submarine types between 1904 and 1914. The eight British A-boats of 1904 had a displacement of 180 tons on surface/207 tons submerged; the German U1 of 1904–6 was slightly larger (197/236) but in every other respect inferior—its horse-power was only 250 on surface/100 submerged, as against 550/150, its surface speed only 10 knots against 11·5, and it was fitted with only a single torpedo-tube instead of the A-boat’s two. This last deficiency was remedied in 1906–8, but the German displacement did not rise above 210/250 nor the horse-power above 400/150, while the British advanced to 550/660 and 1200/550. By 1913 the Germans were building boats of 650/750 displacement and 1400/500 horse-power, but the British were still ahead with 725/810 and 1750/600, and had also a superiority in speed of 16/10 knots to 14/8. The last German boats of which any details have been published are those of 1913–14, with a displacement of about 800 tons on the surface and a maximum speed of 18/7 knots. The British F-boats of the same date are in every way superior to these, with a displacement of 940/1200, a speed of 20/12 knots, and an armament of six torpedo-tubes against the German four. The comparison cannot be carried, in figures, beyond the date of the outbreak of war, but it is well known among the allies of Great Britain that the superiority has been amply maintained, and, in certain important respects, materially increased.

The four years of conflict have, however, afforded an opportunity for a further, and even more important, comparison. The problems of submarine war are not all material problems: moral qualities are needed to secure the efficient working of machinery, the handling of the ship under conditions of danger and difficulty hitherto unknown in war, and the conduct of a campaign with new legal and moral aspects of its own. In two of these departments, those of efficiency and seamanship, the Germans have achieved a considerable show of success, though it could be, and in time will be, easily shown that the British naval service has been more successful still. But in the domain of policy and of international morality, the comparison becomes no longer a comparison but a contrast; the new problems have been dealt with by the British in accordance with the old principles of law and humanity; by the Germans they have not been solved at all, the knot has simply been cut by the cruel steel of the pirate and the murderer. The methods of the U-boat campaign have not only brought successive defeats upon Germany, they will in the end cripple her commerce for many years; and, in addition to her material losses, she will suffer the bitter consequences of moral outlawry.

Of the general efficiency of the German submarines it is too soon to speak, but it may be readily admitted that they have done well. We know, of course, many cases of failure—cases in which boats have been lost by defects in their engines, by running aground through mishandling in shoal waters, or by inability to free themselves from British nets. On the other hand, the German patrol has been kept up with a degree of continuity which, when we remember the dislocation caused by their severe losses, is, at least, a proof of determination. But the British submarine service has to its credit a record of work which, so far as can be judged from the evidence available, is not only better but has been performed under more difficult and dangerous circumstances. In the North Sea patrolling has been carried out regularly, in spite of minefields and of possible danger from the British squadrons, which must, of course, be avoided as carefully as if they were enemies. The German High Seas Fleet has been, for the most part, in hiding, but on the rare and brief occasions when their ships have ventured on one of their furtive raids British submarines have done their part, and the only two German Dreadnoughts which have risked themselves outside Kiel since their Jutland flight were both torpedoed on the same day. Better opportunities, as we shall see later, were found in the Baltic, where British submarines, in spite of German and Swedish nets, ice-fields, and the great distance of bases, succeeded in establishing a complete panic, by torpedoing a number of German war vessels and the cargo ships which they were intended to safeguard.

But it was in the Gallipoli campaign that the conditions were most trying and most novel. The British submarines detailed for the attack in Turkish waters had to begin by navigating the Dardanelles against a very rapid current, setting strongly into a succession of bays. They had to pass searchlights, mines, torpedo-tubes, nets and guard-boats; and in the Sea of Marmora they were awaited by a swarm of cruisers, destroyers, and patrol-boats of all kinds. Yet, from the very first, they were successful in defeating all these. Boat after boat went up without a failure, and maintained herself for weeks at a time without a base, returning with an astonishing record of losses inflicted on the enemy. These records will be given more fully in a later chapter; but that of E. 14, Lieut.-Commander Courtney Boyle, may be quoted here as an example, because it is no exceptional instance but merely the earliest of a number, and set a standard which was well maintained by those who followed. The passage of the narrows was made through the Turkish mine-field, and its difficulty may be judged by the fact that E. 14, during the first 64 hours of the voyage, was diving for 44 hours and 50 minutes. After she began her patrol work, there was more than one day on which she was under fire the whole day, except when she dived from time to time. The difficulty of using her torpedoes was extreme; but she succeeded in hitting and sinking two transports, one of which was 1,500 yards distant and escorted by three destroyers. Finally when, after twenty-two days’ patrolling, she began her return voyage, she was shepherded by a Turkish gunboat, a torpedo-boat, and a tug, one each side of her and one astern, and all hoping to catch her in the net; but by deep and skilful diving she escaped them, and cleared the net and the mine-field at a speed of 7 knots.

Her second patrol extended over twenty-three days. This time the tide was stronger, and the weather less favourable. The total number of steamers, grain dhows and provision ships, sunk on this patrol, amounted to no less than ten, and the return voyage was successfully accomplished, the boat tearing clean through an obstruction off Bokali Kalessi.

The third patrol was again twenty-two days. An hour after starting, E. 14 had her foremost hydroplane fouled by an obstruction which jammed it for the moment, and threw the ship eight points off her course. After a quick scrape she got clear, but found afterwards that her guard wire was nearly cut through. On this trip the wireless apparatus was for a time out of order, but was successfully repaired; eight good ships were burnt or sunk, one of them being a supply ship of 5,000 tons. The return voyage was the most eventful of all. E. 14 came full against the net at Nagara, which had apparently been extended since she went up. The boat was brought up from 80 feet to 45 feet in three seconds, but broke away uninjured, with her bow and periscope standards scraped and scored.

The efficiency of the boat and her crew were beyond praise. Since leaving England E. 14 had run over 12,000 miles and had spent nearly seventy days at close quarters with the enemy in the Sea of Marmora; she had never been in a dockyard or out of running order; she had had no engine defects except such as were immediately put right by her own engine-room staff. Yet she made no claim to be better than her consorts. Nor did she make any boast of her humane treatment of captured enemies; she merely followed the tradition of the British Navy in this matter, and the principles of law as accepted by all civilised nations. The commander of a submarine, whether British or German, has to contend with certain difficulties which did not trouble the cruiser captain of former wars. He cannot spare, from his small ship’s company, a prize crew to take a captured vessel into port; he cannot, except in very rare cases, hope to take her in himself; and, again, if he is to sink her, he cannot find room in his narrow boat for more than one or two prisoners. What he can do is to see that non-combatants and neutrals, at least, shall be exposed as little as possible to danger or suffering; he can give them boats and supplies and every opportunity of reaching land in safety. No one needs to be told how the Germans, either of their own native cruelty or by the orders of a brutal and immoral Higher Command, have in such circumstances chosen to deal with their helpless fellow-men, and even with women and children, and with the wounded and those attending them. But it may be well to put in evidence some of the brief notes in which a typical British submarine commander has recorded as a matter of course his own method on similar occasions. ‘May 8. Allowed two steamers full of refugees to proceed.’ ‘June 20. Boarded and sank 3 sailing dhows; towed crew inshore and gave them some biscuit, beef, and rum and water, as they were rather wet.’ ‘June 22. Let go passenger ship. 23. Burnt two-master and started to tow crew in their boat, but had to dive. Stopped 2 dhows: crews looked so miserable that I only sank one and let the other go. 24. Blew up 2 large dhows; saw 2 heads in the water near another ship; turned and took them up exhausted, gave them food and drink and put them on board their own ship.’ ‘July 30. Burnt sailing vessel with no boat and spent remainder of afternoon trying to find a craft to get rid of her crew into. Found small sailing boat and got rid of them.’ ‘August 3. Burnt large dhow. Unfortunately, 9 on board, including 2 very old men, and their boat was small, so I had to take them on board and proceed with them close to the shore—got rid of them at 9.30 P.M.’

As for the hospital ships, there were numbers of them coming and going; but, empty or full, it is inconceivable that the British Navy should make war upon hospital ships. Victory it will desire, but not by villainy; defeat it will avoid strenuously, but not by the destruction of the first law of human life. The result is none the less certain: in the history of submarine war, as in that of all naval war, it will inevitably be seen that piracy and murder are not the methods of the strong.

CHAPTER III
THE SUBMARINE OF TO-DAY

The feelings of the average landsman, when he sets foot for the first time in a submarine, are a strong mixture of curiosity and apprehension. The curiosity is uppermost—the experience before you is much more novel than, for example, that of a first trip in an aeroplane. From a mountain or tower, a great wheel or a balloon, you have seen the bird’s-eye view of the earth and felt the sensation of hanging over the aerial abyss. But even the fascinating pages of Jules Verne have not told you all that you will feel in a submarine, and nothing but physical experience can do so. You are eager to see the working of new mechanical devices in a wholly strange element, and to learn the use of a new weapon in a wholly strange kind of war. But with this eagerness, there is an underlying sense of uneasiness, a feeling that you are putting yourself into a position where you are as helpless as a mouse in a patent trap. The cause of this is not fear of war risks, for it is equally strong in harbour, or in time of peace. It is probably connected with the common dread of suffocation, which may be an instinct inherited from ages of primitive life in the open. They will tell you, in the submarine service, that it is a mere habit of mind and very soon forgotten. There is even a story of an officer who, on coming ashore from a year’s work in an E-boat, refused to travel in the Tube railway, because it looked so dangerous. He preferred the risks he was used to, and so do most of us.

You stand, then, at the foot of the narrow iron ladder down which you have come from the upper air, you gag your inherited instinct, and let your curiosity loose. Before the boat dives, there is time for a good deal to be taken in. The interior seems large beyond expectation. This is partly an illusion, produced by the vista of the compartments, fore and aft of the central control where you are standing. The bulkhead doors being all open at this moment, you can see into the engine and motor rooms towards the stern, and forward through the battery compartment to the bow torpedo-tubes. The number of men seems large too, and they are all busy; but you note that every part of them is more active than their feet—there is very little coming and going. In the control, close to you, are the captain, a lieutenant, a steersman, and seven or eight other men for working the ballast tanks, air valves, electrical apparatus, and hydroplanes. The last two of them have just come down from the deck—the hatches are closed—engines have already been running for some minutes, though the order escaped your observation.

You are invited ‘to see her dive.’ You go up to the forward conning-tower scuttle and flatten your face against the thick glass. An order is given. You hear the hissing of air, as the ballast tanks are filled. You expect to see the forward part of the boat dip down into the water in which she is heaving. Instead of that, it is apparently the sea which lifts itself up, moves along the deck, and seems to be coming in a huge slow wave over your scuttle. The light of day gives place to a green twilight, full of small bubbles. Mentally you feel a slight chill; but physically, a warm and sticky sensation. As there is nothing more to be seen out of window, you return to your instructor. He explains to you that the ship is now running on her motors, and that her speed is therefore low—not nearly enough to overhaul a vessel or convoy of any power. On the surface, with her other engines, she could far more than double the pace; and even with the motors, she could do a spurt for a short time—but spurts are very expensive; for they use up the battery power with ruinous rapidity, and then a return to the surface will be necessary, whether safe or not.

At this point it may strike you suddenly that you are now under water—you begin to wonder how deep you are, and why you have not perceived any change in the boat’s position. The answer is that the depth marked on the gauges is only twenty feet, and the angle of descent was therefore very slight—much too slight to be perceptible in the short length of a single compartment. The depth of twenty feet is now being maintained with surprising steadiness; the explanation is that two entirely separate forces are at work. First, there are the horizontal rudders or hydroplanes, fitted outside the vessel both fore and aft, by which she can be forced down, provided she has sufficient way on, in much the same fashion as an ordinary vertical rudder forces a ship to one side or the other. But this is only the diving apparatus; to keep her down, there is her water ballast—the water which was taken into her main ballast tanks, when the order to submerge was given. These tanks contain a sufficient weight of water to counteract the normal buoyancy of the boat, by which she would naturally float upon the surface. When they are emptied, she will neither sink nor rise of her own motion—she will lie or run at whatever depth she is placed, by her hydroplanes or otherwise.

These, you will have noticed, were called the ‘main’ ballast tanks—there would seem then to be others. There are, and several kinds of them. First, there is an auxiliary ballast tank, which has a peculiar use of its own. A submarine must be able to float or submerge in fresh water as well as at sea; for her base or harbour will often be in the mouth of a river, or she may have to navigate a river, a canal, or a lake. It is a point that would not probably have occurred to you, but the difference between the density of fresh and salt water is sufficiently great to make a real difficulty here. Everyone knows that it is less easy to float in fresh water, and less easy to sink in salt. For practical purposes, a submerged boat is less buoyant in fresh water by 26 tons in 1000, and vice versa; so that when a submarine of 1000 tons leaves a river for the sea, she must take an extra 26 tons of ballast to keep her down, and when she comes home again she must get rid of 26 tons, or she will sink so much deeper in the fresh water. For this purpose she has a special tank of the right size, proportioned to her tonnage; and it is placed in the middle of the ship, in order that it may not interfere with her trim when it is filled or emptied.

That last remark will put you in mind that, in any kind of navigation, the trim of the boat is a delicate and important matter. Even in very large and heavy ships you may be able, by shifting guns or cargo, to slip off a shoal, or right a leaking vessel after a collision. In a tickle boat like a submarine, it is necessary to have some means of trimming the vessel, fore or aft, at any moment, and especially when about to dive, or when caught by some under-water obstruction. Tanks are therefore fitted for this purpose at each end of the boat. They are comparatively small, because the effect required is in ordinary circumstances very limited, and in a desperate emergency they may need to be supplemented by rushing the crew fore or aft, as living ballast. An example of this will be found in a later chapter.

You may now feel that you have heard enough of tanks; but your instructor will insist on showing you a whole additional series. He will make a point of your recognising that a submarine, when submerged, is in reality hanging in the water as a balloon hangs in the air, and for every loss of weight she must be instantaneously compensated, or she will begin to rise. What loss of weight can she suffer while actually under water? It is not perhaps very hard to guess. There is, first of all, the consumption of oil by the engines; secondly, the consumption of food and fresh water by the crew; and thirdly, the departure from time to time of torpedoes. Also, when on the surface, there may be gun ammunition fired away, or other things heaved overboard, and allowance must be made for this when the boat goes down again. The modern submarine is prepared to keep her balance under all such circumstances. She has compensating tanks, and they are placed as near as possible to the oil-tank, fresh-water tank, or torpedo-tube, for whose diminished weight they are to compensate.

You are probably more interested in the torpedo-tubes than in the oil-tanks. It is time then to go forward. You pass through the battery compartment, where the officers’ quarters are, and are shown (under the floor) the accumulators, ranged like the honey sections in the frames of a beehive, and very carefully covered over with flexible waterproof covering as well as with close-jointed planking. What would happen if water did find its way down to the batteries? An instant discharge of chlorine gas, blinding and suffocating. What would you do then? Come to the surface at all costs—and lucky if you are in time! The Germans know all about that—and not long ago one of our own boats was only saved by the good goal-keeping of a lieutenant, who caught up a lid of some sort, and stood by the leak, neatly fending off the water spurt from the door of the battery compartment.

Now you are in the forward torpedo compartment, and there are the tubes. I need not say anything about their size or number—you will realise at a glance that when a couple are loosed off at once, a good deal of weight goes out of the ship. The ordinary 18-inch fish is 17 feet long, and takes some handling. The explosive alone in her war-head weighs as much as a big man, say 12½ stone, and a 21-inch fish carries twice as much as that, packed in some four feet of her length. Behind that comes the air chamber—another ten feet—with the compressed air to drive the engine, which is in her stern. The air is stored at a pressure of over 2000 lbs. to the square inch; so the steel walls of the chamber must be thick, and this makes another heavy item. Lastly, there is the engine-box with its four-cylinder engine, two propellers, gyroscope and steering gear. Altogether, an 18-inch fish will weigh nearly three-quarters of a ton, and a 21-inch over 2000 lbs., so that the amount of compensation needed when you fire, is considerable.

To see how it is done, we will imagine ourselves firing this starboard tube. The torpedo is got ready, and special care is taken to make sure that the firing-pin in her nose is not forgotten. Cases have been known in which a ship has been hit full by a torpedo which did not explode—just as a good many Zeppelin bombs were found in London, after the early raids, with the detonating pin not drawn. The fish is now ready to come alive, and is slid into the tube. The door is shut behind it, and the water-tight outer door, at the other end of the tube, is now ready to be opened by powerful levers. But the immediate result of this opening would be an inrush of sea-water which would weigh the boat’s head down; for though the fish’s belly fits the tube pretty closely, there is a good deal of empty space where it tapers towards the nose and tail. Here comes in the tank system. When the tube is loaded, this empty space is filled by water from within the ship, so that no change of weight occurs when you open the outer door. But when the firing-button has been pushed, and the torpedo has been shot out by an air-charge behind it there is no possibility of preventing the whole tube from filling with water, and this water must be got rid of before the tube can be reloaded. To do this, you first close the outer door again; then you have to deal with the tubeful of water. A good part of it is what the ship herself supplied to fill the space round the torpedo; and this must be pumped back into the special tank it came from. The remainder is the sea-water which rushed in, to take the place left empty by the departing torpedo: and this must be pumped into another special tank to prevent the ship feeling the loss of the torpedo’s weight. When you get a fresh supply of torpedoes, these special compensating tanks (which are really a kind of dummy torpedoes) will be emptied out, one for each new torpedo. Meantime, you have now got the tube empty, and can open the inner door and reload.

But what of the torpedo which has been fired? It is travelling towards its mark at a speed of between thirty-five and forty knots, if we suppose the range to be an ordinary one, under 1000 yards, and the torpedo to have been ‘run hot,’ i.e. driven by hot air instead of cold. The compressed air is heated mechanically inside the torpedo, in the act of passing from the air chamber to the machinery, and this increases both the speed and range. But it is not always convenient or possible to start the heating apparatus, and even when ‘run cold’ the fish will do thirty knots. This speed is amazing, but it is one of the least wonderful of the torpedo’s qualities. The steering of the machine is a double miracle. One device makes it take, after the first plunge, exactly the depth you desire, and another—a gyroscope fitted inside the rudder gear—keeps it straight on its course; or makes it, if you wish, turn in a circle and strike its prey, boomerang fashion. The head of the fish can also be fitted with cutters which will cut through any torpedo-netting that a ship can afford to carry. The only thing that no ingenuity can accomplish is to make a torpedo invisible during its run. The compressed air, when it has passed through the engine, must escape, and it comes to the surface in a continuous boiling line of bubbles. This is visible at a considerable distance; and though, when the track is sighted by the look-out, the torpedo itself is of course always well ahead of the nearest spot where the bubbles are seen rising, it is surprising how often ships do succeed in avoiding a direct shot. A prompt cry from the look-out, a steersman ready to put his helm over instantly, and the torpedo goes bubbling past, a few feet ahead or astern, or comes in on a tangent and runs harmlessly along the ship’s side without exploding. Then away it goes across the open sea, until the compressed air is exhausted, the engine stops, and the mechanical sinker sends it to the ocean bed, which must be fairly strewn with dead torpedoes by this time; for as we know, to our advantage, the proportion of misses to hits is very large in the U-boat’s record.

Now that you have seen the weapon—and can at any rate imagine the handling of it—you are naturally keen to sight the game, and realise the conditions of a good shot. You go back to the central compartment, where the Commander is ready to show you a ship through the periscope. Not, of course, an enemy ship—in this war, if you want a shot at an enemy ship, you must go into his own waters—into the Bight or the Baltic—to find him; and even there he is probably tucked up very tight in his berth, with chained barges and heavy nets all round him, and mines all up the approach. But there are plenty of our own ships out every day—sweeping, cruising, trading; and transporting men, food, mails, and munitions. And what you see will help you to understand why the Germans have spent so many torpedoes, and sunk so comparatively small a proportion of our enormous tonnage.

The boat is now less deep in the water; the gauges mark 15 feet, and you are told that the top of the periscope is therefore some two feet above the surface. The shaft of it is round, like a large vertical piston; but at the bottom it ends in a flattened box, with a hand-grip projecting on each side. You take hold of the grips and look into the box. Nothing is visible but an expanse of water, with a coast-line of low hills beyond it—all in miniature. The Commander presses the back of your left hand on the grip, and you move round slowly as the periscope revolves. The coast-line goes out of the picture, the sea lies open to the horizon, and upon it appears a line of odd-looking spots. They are moving; for the nearest one, which was narrow a moment ago, is now three or four times as broad, and is in a different place in the line.

The line, you are told, is not a line at all, but a convoy, in fairly regular formation. The nearest spot is a destroyer, zigzagging on the flank; the others are ships which have been so effectively ‘dazzled’ that their shapes are unrecognisable. You carry on, in hope of something nearer, and suddenly a much larger object comes into the field of vision. A ship, of course, though it does not look like any ship you have ever seen; and you are asked to guess its distance and direction. You are bewildered at first; for as you were moving the lens rapidly to starboard, the vessel came in rapidly to port, and as her dazzle-paint makes her stern indistinguishable from her bows, you continue to think she is steaming in that direction. After a more careful observation, this mistake is corrected. She is crossing us from port to starboard. But at what angle? This is vitally important, for the possibility of getting in a successful shot would depend entirely upon the answer. We are ourselves heading about due north: she is crossing to the east: if her course is south of east, she is coming nearer to us, and our torpedo would strike her before the beam—the most favourable chance. If, on the contrary, her course is north of east she is going away, and the torpedo would have a poor chance of hitting her abaft the beam. In fact, it would not be worth while to risk losing so costly a shot. A torpedo at present prices is worth not far short of £2000, and we only carry two for each tube.

You look long and hard at this dazzle-ship. She doesn’t give you any sensation of being dazzled; but she is, in some queer way, all wrong—her proportions are wrong, she is somehow not herself, not what she ought to be. If you fix your attention on one end of her, she seems to point one way—if you look away at her other end, she is doing something different. You can’t see the height of her funnels clearly, or their relative position. But, with care, you decide that she is coming about south-east and will be therefore your bird in two minutes’ time. The Commander is interested. He takes a look himself, laughs, and puts you back at the eye-piece. You hold on in hope that he may, after all, be wrong; but the bird ends by getting well away to the north-east. Your error covered just ninety degrees, and the camouflage had beaten you completely. You begin to think that the ingenuity at command of the nation has been underestimated. But this ship is nothing of a dazzle, the Commander tells you—he can show you one whose cut-water seems always to be moving at a right angle to her stern!

‘Does not look like any ship you have ever seen.’

He adds that he knew all about that cruiser, and she knew all about him. Otherwise he would not have shown even his periscope; and if he had, she would have had a shell into him by now, and a depth-charge to follow. A depth-charge is perhaps the most formidable weapon against which the submarine has to be on guard. It is a bomb, with a detonator which can be set to explode when it reaches any given depth. A small one would need to hit the mark full, or be very close to it, in order to get a satisfactory result; but the newer and larger ones will seriously damage a submarine within an area of forty yards. The charge is either dropped over the stern of the pursuing vessel, when she is thought to be just over or just ahead of the enemy; or it is fired out of a small and handy short-range howitzer—a kind of lob-shot, a number of which can be made by several patrol boats acting together, so as to cover a larger area with much less risk of embarrassing each other. Even if the submarine is not destroyed outright, the chances are in such a case that she will be so damaged as to be forced to the surface or to the bottom, and then the end is certain. A bad leak would bring her up—an injury to her tanks or rudders might drive her down.

You are uncomfortably reminded once more of that inherited dislike of death by suffocation. If a submarine cannot rise to the surface, you ask, is there no possible means of escape? The answer is that it may be possible, with great difficulty, to get out of the boat; but there is very little chance that you would survive. The lungs are not fitted to bear so great and sudden a change of pressure as that felt in passing from the boat to the water, and from the deep water to the surface. You are perhaps surprised; but the pressure of sea-water at 160 feet is equal to five atmospheres, or about 75 lbs. to the square inch. To pass safely through this to the ordinary surface atmosphere would need a long and gradual process, and not a sudden rise of a few seconds. A very brave attempt was made on one occasion, when a British submarine had gone to the bottom during her trials, and could not be got up by any effort of her crew. The agony of the situation was intensified by the fact that help was close at hand, if only the alarm could be given, and the whereabouts of the submarine communicated to the rescuers. The officers of the sunken boat were, of course, perfectly aware of the danger from sudden change of pressure; but one of them volunteered to go to the surface, alive or dead, and carry a message on the chance of attracting some ship’s attention. To lessen the risk as far as possible, it was arranged that he should go up into the conning-tower, and that the hatch should then be closed beneath him and the water gradually admitted. As it flowed slowly in, and mounted round him, the air in the top of the conning-tower would diminish in extent but increase in pressure. When it reached his neck, the internal pressure would be nearly equal to the external. He would be able to open the top, possibly to make his escape, and conceivably to reach the surface without his lungs being fatally injured. If he failed, he would at any rate have given his life for the chance of saving his comrades.

The Commander accompanied him into the conning-tower, meaning, it is said, to return into the ship himself when he had seen to all the arrangements. But when the water was admitted, the two of them were shot out together, and as it happened it was the volunteer who was killed, by striking against the superstructure, while the Commander came up alive. In no long time—though it must have seemed unendurably long to those below, waiting in complete uncertainty—the rescuers were informed, found the submarine, and got a hawser under her stern. They raised her high enough out of the water, vertically, to open a hatch and save the crew. Then the hawser gave, and the boat went down again.

That story is not unlikely to haunt you all the way home, and for a long time afterwards. It may even make a difference to your whole feeling about the war under water, as waged by our own Service. The submarine is not merely an incredibly clever box of mechanical toys, nor is it only the fit weapon of a cruel and ruthless enemy; it is also a true part of the Navy without fear and without reproach, whose men play the great game for each other and for their country, and play it more greatly than we know. The tune of their service is a kind of undertone; but it is in the heroic key, and cannot fall below it.

CHAPTER IV
A BRITISH SUBMARINE BASE

Our submarine now returns to the surface. She is proceeding on patrol, and her commander, as he bids us good-bye, recommends us to put into the port from which he has just come, and see what a submarine base is like. We take his advice, and return to our trawler. Her head is turned westward and signals are made and answered. The skipper informs us that we are about to pass through a mine-field where the mines are as thick as herring-roe. It is some consolation to hear that ‘The Sweep’ has already done its daily morning work, and that the channel is presumably clear.

The East Coast of England, from Tynemouth to Thames mouth, is pierced with some ten or a dozen estuaries, all more or less suitable for flotilla bases. It is unnecessary to say how many of these are used by our submarines, or which of them it is that we are about to enter. But a short description can do no harm, because one of these bases is very like another, and all are absolutely impervious to enemy craft. Even if they could navigate the mine-field, so thickly strewn with both our mines and their own, and so constantly and thoughtfully rearranged, they would not find it possible to slip, as we are doing, past the elaborate boom at the harbour mouth, or to escape being sunk by the guns which dominate it, and the seaplanes which are constantly passing over it.

And now that we are inside, it looks an even more dangerous place for an intruder—a perfect hornets’ nest. Close to us on the left lies a small pier, with buildings on a hill behind it—the Commodore’s house and offices, seamen’s training-school, and gymnasium. At the pier-head are two or three picket-boats; and a little further on, a light cruiser with her observation balloon mounted. The vast sheds beyond are the hangars of the Air Service. They are painted in a kind of Futurist style, which gives them a queer look from below, but makes them, when seen from a thousand feet up, either invisible or like a landscape of high roads, cornfields, hay-stacks and groups of trees—objects quite uninviting to any stray air-raider. But their best protection is the efficiency of the machines and men inside them.

Over on the opposite side of the river stretches a long quay. The background of it is a naval railway station; the ships lying in front of it are partly supply ships, partly merchant vessels brought in under convoy, and two of them are depot ships, moored permanently there, and used as headquarters for the Submarine, Destroyer, and other services. Out in the centre of the harbour lies a still larger depot ship, the floating headquarters of the Admiral who is Commodore of the port; and behind her, in two long lines, stretching away upstream into the far distance, lies an apparently inexhaustible force of light cruisers, destroyers, and destroyer-leaders, with here and there a submarine—one is slung aloft in a dry-dock for overhauling. A side creek to the left is crowded with trawlers and drifters, whose men are now ashore ‘between sweeps.’ At this hour of the day the place is at its fullest, for the daily ‘Beef Trip,’ or food convoy, has just come in, and the dozen destroyers which escorted it are all lying at their moorings, on both sides of the main stream line. There they will be till to-night, when at 7 o’clock to the second they will all slip away again into the twilight like thin grey ghostly dogs, shepherding another flock of very substantial sheep.

The trawler puts us aboard the depot ship; but the Admiral is not there. A picket-boat takes us over to his pier, and we find him in his chart-room, surrounded by maps marked with spots and figures in different colours, quite unintelligible except to those who have the key, and even to them no subject for conversation at large. But the Admiral is a good talker, his mind is an encyclopædia of submarine war and the working of a naval base, and he is amazingly quick in separating the facts which interest you, and yet are fit for repetition outside, from those which you must forget as soon as you have heard them. He begins by explaining the daily routine of the port—the mine-sweeping, which is done regularly twice a day, but at what times the enemy can only guess, and the mine-laying, which is a game of brain against brain, each side trying to see through the other’s devices and catch him with their own. An elementary example would be the obvious dodge of moving the enemy’s mine a short distance, instead of removing it altogether—so that when next he comes that way, he shall run into it unexpectedly, and perish by his own trap. But this, as I have described it, is too simple a device to be successful, and the ingenuity of our mine-layers has improved upon it by a dozen skilful variations. Much can be done by studying carefully the habits of the German mind. One officer, who is specially skilled in this matter, has the credit of being able to make a U.C.-boat lay her eggs just where he pleases, and of knowing exactly when it will be time to go and collect them.

Our own mine-laying and coastal patrol would be more exciting if the possible successes were not limited to an occasional submarine. It is a little dull to be always laying traps for a flotilla that never comes. The work of our coastal submarines is therefore monotonous; but it is none the less invaluable. Besides making sure, it trains a continual succession of crews for oversea work, and gives experience to young commanders. The number of boats increases every year, and the flow of volunteer entries keeps pace with it. The standard demanded is very high, and it is fully maintained. The prize of efficiency is immediate entry into the hardships and dangers of the oversea patrol.

There is no doubt that the hardships are more trying to our men than the dangers. The oversea patrol is kept up through the winter. The weather off the enemy’s coast is often very severe, and boats have to be shut down for long periods. In summer, the work of diving patrols is almost equally arduous, owing to the longer hours of daylight. Boats must frequently be submerged for nineteen or twenty hours at a time; and after the first twelve of these, the air, in spite of purifiers, becomes oppressive to breathe—not even the head of a match will burn. Then there are two special conditions tending towards depression. First, the positive results are few, and form no measure of the work or the risks. Results are obtained, but never in proportion to the devotion and sanguine hopes of the Service. It is a baffling and trying experience to live for days with your eye glued to a periscope—the field of vision is contracted, and too close to the water. The psychological effect of the strain would be bad in the case of any but highly trained and selected officers—as one of them has said, the sighting of a surface enemy is a relief seldom obtained. The Germans are fortunate in the daily, almost hourly, sighting of targets. But their officers, in consequence of continual heavy losses, are commonly sent to sea undertrained, and their results are naturally poor in proportion to the torpedoes expended.

The second of the two causes which would discourage any but the finest spirit, is the fact that an almost complete silence broods over the Submarine Service. Not only is the work done mostly in the deep-sea twilight; but, however arduous and creditable it may be, it is seldom recognised publicly. Rewards are given, but not openly. A commander may reappear for a day or two among his friends, wearing the ribbon of the D.S.O. or the V.C., or both, but little or nothing will be published of the actions by which he won them. It is not only that information must be kept from reaching the enemy—and naturally the German Admiralty is always anxious to know how their boats are lost—but there is also a settled custom in our Navy, a custom older than the Submarine Service, by which ‘mention in despatches’ is confined to incidents during which one or both sides have been under fire, from gun or torpedo. Custom in the Navy is generally a sound rule; but in this particular instance, the custom did not grow up to fit the case, and does not fit it. The Admiral does not say anything on this point; but he tells us that the real danger a submarine commander has to face is not the gun or the torpedo. He may come off his patrol without having been shot at by either, and yet may be entitled to the credit of having been in action for days and nights on end. In fact, every minute that he is in enemy waters he is in danger from mines, and from a host of formidable pursuers—aeroplanes and Zeppelins with bombs, and fast anti-submarine craft with depth-charges and explosive sweeps. No doubt all ships are to some extent in danger from mines, but no other class of vessel is asked to run the gauntlet on the enemy’s coast to anything like the same extent. If surface ships are sent, they are sent for a single operation, the ground is prepared for them as far as possible, the period of exposure is short, and when the work is done the force is withdrawn. But our submarines are, for days and weeks at a time, close to known mine-fields and in areas most likely to hold new or drifted mines. They are harassed by hunters to whom they can make no reply, and particularly by aircraft, which can detect them even at sixty feet below the surface. The areas in which they work are comparatively narrow, and so closely patrolled by small craft that it is seldom possible to come to the surface in daylight; navigation, too, is very difficult, and the rapidly changing densities of the water off the enemy’s coast make the trimming of the boat and the depth control a matter of constant anxiety.

Yet not only are officers and men found in plenty to enter this service of twilight and silence, but the keenness they show for it is unfailing. The work itself is their one ambition, and their records are astounding. Ask the Captain (S.) of this port. In two years he has organised 370 cruises, lasting in all 1680 days, and extending over a surface mileage of more than 200,000 miles. There was only a single breakdown, and that ended in a triumph; for the Commander got himself towed back by an enemy trawler, neatly captured for the purpose. Another—Commander Talbot—made twenty-one cruises; Lieutenant C. Turner, nineteen; Commanders Goodhart and Leir, seventeen each; Commander Benning and Lieut. C. Moncreiffe, sixteen. More wonderful still is the fact that the first two of these officers spent fifty-six and sixty-five days respectively in enemy waters, and the other four from thirty-six to forty-nine days each. The most interesting part of their adventures cannot yet be told; but much may be guessed from an outline or two. Commander Leir, for instance, was repeatedly in action with Zeppelins, seaplanes, and anti-submarine craft, one of which he sank. He was present at the action in the Heligoland Bight in August 1914, and brought home some German prisoners. Commander Benning was also repeatedly in action. Once, after torpedoing an armed auxiliary cruiser, he was forced by enemy sweepers to dive into a German mine-field. There he had to stay, with batteries exhausted, till night gave him a chance of recharging. Another time he went down into a mine-field of his own will, to lie in wait for an armed auxiliary. He was there for three hours, but ambushed her successfully in the end, close to the German coast. Lieut.-Commander Turner covered 20,000 miles to his own score, and passed much of his time actually in the swept channels, with enemy patrols in sight the whole day. Sometimes he came up and fought them, sometimes they hunted him with depth-charges. For those who sleep in beds and travel in buses, it is an almost unimaginable life. ‘Yes,’ says the Admiral, ‘in this Service, officers need a two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage every hour they are at sea: and they have it.’

‘Towed back by an enemy trawler.’

The charts are put away. We move out, first to the gymnasium, where physical drill is going on, then towards the great air-sheds. As we approach the first of these, an officer meets us and hands a block to the Admiral with the morning report upon it.

The Admiral’s face lights up as he reads. ‘A lucky chance—something to interest you.’ The Beef Trip, it appears, which has just returned, was escorted as usual by two seaplanes, flying ahead of the convoy. The starboard one of these had sighted a submarine at 8.30 A.M. and swooped towards her instantly. She was nearly submerged when the seaplane passed over her, but the two big depth-charges which were dropped in a flash, fell right into her wash and close to the conning-tower, which disappeared in the explosion.

An excellent bit of work! But the face of the officer standing by shows a distinct cloud. ‘What is it?’ Well, the fact is that the pilot of the other seaplane, a mile and a half away to port, had an impression that the submarine was British.

The pilot of the bomb-dropper is sent for and comes out at once—a fair-haired and very young lieutenant, with an air of perfectly undisturbed serenity. He is sure nothing is wrong—it is ‘only a muddle.’ His companion pilot had certainly sighted and spoken a British submarine some quarter of an hour earlier; but this was not the one. Also another boat, E. 134, was out on patrol in that precise direction, but she was not due in that spot till 11 o’clock, B.S.T., and it was highly improbable she would be there so much before her time. Besides, he knew the colour of a Hun conning-tower. Undoubtedly it was ‘only a muddle.’ The explanation sounds a good one, but it is a speculation, not a certainty; and on further inquiry, it appears that nothing has since been heard of E. 134. The Admiral sends off the young pilot with a word of good cheer; but when he has gone, he hands back the report with a serious look. The incident has become too interesting. It is no longer something to tell a visitor. We go into the sheds and spend the remainder of our time in viewing the huge Americas and Handley-Pages.

The rest of the story comes after lunch, when we go to visit the Captain (S.) in his depot ship. He has heard all about our pilot, and our submarine too. E. 134 lay all night in her billet, resting on the bottom at 140 feet and listening with all her hydrophones. In the morning her watch was rewarded; she heard, first, the monotonous low ticking of a German submarine’s motors passing near her on the outward patrol—then at 8.30 the heavy dull boom of two explosions close together—then not a sound more! Finally, at her appointed time, noting that the U-boat had never stirred again, she rose to the surface and came home in rear of the sweep. The muddle is cleared up, and in the best manner.

‘She was nearly submerged when the seaplane passed over her.’

We discuss the dead submarine and ask whether she would be, or would have been, more formidable when used against a convoy than against a single ship. The Captain (S.) who has already been torpedoed once himself, thinks there can be no doubt on this subject. ‘A single ship is much more easily approached than a convoy—she has only one set of eyes on the look-out, from one position, and the enemy can stalk her without fear of being trodden on from other quarters. Convoys ought to escape nearly every time, and they do. Look at the record of this port—not one loss in two years.’ This opinion is based on experience, but the matter looks different from the point of view of the convoy escort, whose responsibility weighs upon him every day afresh. This we discover when we pass on to visit a destroyer-leader, at a later hour in the evening. She is being got ready for the night’s work and it is now just six, but her captain assures us that what remains of his time is entirely ours. He takes us down to his own room, an elegant and almost spacious apartment, very unlike anything to be seen in a destroyer of the ordinary type; and he, too, answers our question positively. ‘Which is easiest—to hit a single ship or a convoy? The question answers itself—a submarine ought to get at least one bird out of a covey every time! She does not do it, perhaps; but look at the trouble we take to prevent her. Think of all the work put in by the auxiliary patrol to keep the sea fairly clear to start with—armed yachts, trawlers, whalers, drifters, motor-launches, mine-sweepers, net-drifters and motor-boats, out day and night all round the whole coast of the U.K. That is their routine work; and besides that they supply escorts to individual ships of special value and to ocean convoys, when they have arrived at their port of initial entry, and are to be taken on elsewhere. Then there are the various kinds of protective devices for the ships themselves—the dazzle-painting, the smoke-boxes on broads, and the smoke-boxes for floating behind you. And since we are talking of these things, there is the work of the destroyers and trawlers on regular convoy.’ This is, of course, the captain’s own job, and we naturally hint a desire that he should pursue the subject.

‘There is no difficulty about it—the Germans already know all that they can ever know of our convoy system—how it is organised in the form of group-sailings on definite routes, and worked, as far as possible, at night, with extra protection given by daylight and during moonlight hours—above all, how successful it is, and how, little by little, they have given up the chase of mercantile convoys for the attack of transports and single ships of great size and value. In one month, for instance, of the present year, 690 vessels were convoyed from England to France, of which only three were attacked, and only two sunk, including one small sailing ship. More astonishing still, out of 693 convoyed from France to England in the same month not one was touched, or even attacked. Then there are the Dutch and Scandinavian lines.’

We should like to know exactly how it is done, and especially what part the destroyers play in the game. Briefly, but very sharply, the picture is drawn for us. You see a fine August day, off the coast of Scotland, with white summer clouds over a rippling sea; a compact convoy of eight ships sailing in two columns, with a ninth lagging on the left, three times her proper distance to the rear. Their speed is slow; they are flanked on both sides, fore and aft, by armed trawlers, with one just ahead of the two columns, and they are covered by two fast destroyers. The first of these is ahead of the convoy, zigzagging continuously from side to side across the whole front. The second is zigzagging in another direction. Suddenly, from this second destroyer, a signal is seen to fly. Her look-out has spotted the wake of a periscope 1000 yards away on her starboard bow, moving to cut off the convoy, from the right column of which it is already not more than 1500 yards distant. A torpedo fired at this moment should cross the convoy formation exactly in the middle, and would have an excellent chance of sinking either of the centre ships in either column—it could hardly miss all four. But the destroyer has in a moment altered course 8 points to starboard, and is prolonging this zigzag directly towards the enemy at thirty-odd knots, with her forward guns blazing. The U-boat captain, no doubt, longs to take his shot into the brown; but he has less than one minute in which to perform the more urgent duty of saving his own ship. Down he goes, with a depth-charge after him, and is not seen or heard of again in this story. The convoy calls up its lame duck and goes safely to its destination.

‘Yes,’ says the Captain, ‘we get them through, and it all looks very simple; but it’s mostly a matter of ten seconds, and you can’t grow fat on a daily margin of ten seconds.’

‘But the Admiral has something to say on your report?’

‘The Admiral writes outside, “Good look-out and prompt action of Swallow probably averted a casualty to the convoy.” He has to write that most days—he must be tired of writing it.’

It is now two minutes to seven. As we drop into our picket-boat, the destroyer slips silently from her moorings and fades away down stream with eleven other thin grey phantoms.

CHAPTER V
SUBMARINES AND WAR POLICY

‘Strategy,’ says the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ ‘has been curtly described as the art of concentrating an effective fighting force at a given place at a given time, and tactics as the art of using it when there.’ In less scientific language, you fight a battle by means of tactics, and a campaign by means of strategy. But when nations live, as we have all been living for many years past, in constant preparation for war, there must be forethought as to the means and methods to be employed. Each nation has broad general plans, ready for the moment when fighting is decided upon, and ships, guns, and armies are provided accordingly. This is what is meant by war policy; and examples will come to mind at once. We live in a group of islands, with Dominions and other possessions overseas, and we have no desire to attack our continental neighbours. British war policy has therefore always been chiefly directed to the provision of an invincible navy for defending our shores and our commerce. The German Empire, on the other hand, is practically self-contained; it lies on the Continent, with land powers for neighbours whom it has long hoped and intended to dominate. German war policy, therefore, concerned itself until quite recently with plans for aggression by land, and only provided a powerful fleet when it became desirable to have a weapon in hand against England—not necessarily to fight us on equal terms, but, as they said themselves, to make us hesitate to take sides against them.

In this way it came about that both countries had a great naval war policy, and watched each other carefully, building dreadnoughts against dreadnoughts, and cruisers against cruisers. We made great and successful efforts to keep the lead; for sea power is a matter of life and death to us; and the Germans were spending every mark they could spare, to get more and more nearly upon even terms. It is certain that the war policy of both Powers took account of the possible uses of submarine boats; but the lines of thought which they followed were in some ways widely different, and they led, when war came, to unexpected developments. Let us consider for a few moments what the British admirals on the one hand, and the German on the other, intended to do with their submarine forces, and what they actually did when the time for action came.

British war policy was essentially non-aggressive. The Navy had but one possible antagonist of the first rank at sea, and that one we should never have fought with, except in a war of defence. Our submarines, therefore, had two obvious duties marked out for them. They would help in coast defence by making it dangerous for ships of war or transports to approach, and they might be used, if an opportunity arose, to attack a fleet in harbour, or a cruiser at sea. There was every probability that any fleet of a Power at war with us would sooner or later have to spend a good deal of time in port, and it would certainly be well to have the means to attack it there. But, important as this function was, the idea of defence against invasion probably came first, and there is no doubt that an efficient submarine force is a very formidable addition to our flotilla for coast defence. Perhaps we thought, in those years of perpetual preparation, too much about the ‘Invasion of England’ and too little about the duty of supporting our Allies on land; and we had this much justification, that the Power from which we had every reason to expect an attack, was one directed by men of great energy and determination, certain to be relentless in pressing a war home upon us, even at the risk of a heavy loss. On the other hand, those who spoke and wrote most about invasion, nearly always failed to realise the immense difficulty of the undertaking; and they failed especially to see that, in modern times, the conditions had changed very considerably in favour of the defence. The initial problem of an invader by sea must always be the provision of transport sufficient for a large body of troops, with arms, equipment, and supplies of food and munitions. Even if we allow only two tons of shipping per man—the Japanese allowed six tons—the transport of 100,000 men would take twenty vessels of 10,000 tons each, and to collect these and load them would be a big operation; difficult to conceal. In fact to conceal it, for a sufficiently long time, from a defence force well supplied with wireless telegraphy, fast scouts, and aerial observation, would now be a practical impossibility. But even if we suppose such an expedition to be able (under cover of fog, or by a complete surprise) to cross the North Sea unobserved, there remains the further difficulty of the landing. A place must be found where the invaders could obtain immediate control of supplies and communications; there are but half a dozen such places at most upon our eastern coast-line, and these are all prepared for a strenuous defence by land. If we add to the land defence a mine-field and the presence of an unknown number of submarines, the attempt becomes one involving the certainty of immense losses, and the extreme probability of failure. Even the German war-lords have not yet made up their minds to the risk of seeing eight or ten divisions drowned in an hour.

Besides coast defence and harbour attack, there might possibly be a chance for our submarines in a fleet action. Of that, all that can be said now is that our Submarine Service is believed to have shown greater promptness and ingenuity in its preparations than the German Admiralty, and awaits the next naval engagement with eager anticipation. But already it has been found practicable to use our submarines for two very important kinds of work, to an extent which was certainly quite unforeseen. One of these is the chase and destruction of enemy submarines—a kind of service which has been pronounced impossible, even in books written during the later stages of the War, but actual examples of which will be given in one of the chapters which describe our hunting methods. The other kind of work is the blockade of the enemy’s shipping trade and supply service, to be described when we come to the account of our submarine campaigns in the Baltic and Dardanelles.

If we turn now to German naval policy, we shall come at once upon an interesting point, which has not been generally understood. We have been told that the German Admiralty, before the War, was completely deceived as to the value of the submarine. And Mr. Marley Hay has been often quoted as saying that, in several conversations in 1911, Admiral von Tirpitz ‘expressed emphatically his opinion that he considered submarines to be in an experimental stage, of doubtful utility, and that the German Government was not at all convinced that they would form an essential or a conspicuous part of their future naval programme.’ Mr. Hay shows clearly that this was not said with the object of misleading; for he was urging Tirpitz to build, and the Admiral continued to refuse. When war broke out, the German Navy had only twenty-seven submarines built against seventy-six British and seventy French boats, and she was only building twelve more, against the twenty and twenty-three on our side. This may have been partly due to a miscalculation of their efficiency; but the main reason was probably that the directors of German war policy were (at that time) preparing for a war in which our Navy was to take no part. The account with England was to be settled at a later date. The immediate intention was to deal with France and Russia, and the assistance of the Austrian and Italian submarines in the Mediterranean was of course reckoned upon.

When war came these calculations were falsified. The German High Seas Fleet found itself unable to stand up to ours, and German war policy was forced to take a different direction. The U-boats’ first allotted task was the legitimate one of reducing our margin of superiority in battle-ships and cruisers. While our Fleet was certain to keep the sea, and protect our long coast-line and huge merchant tonnage, the German High Seas Fleet must lie in the Kiel Canal, risking only furtive and futile rushes into the open. But if the U-boats could hit a sufficient number of our more active war-ships, they might bring the forces nearer to an equality, and perhaps establish a prestige for their own Service. How they failed in this attempt we shall see presently.

When their failure in the game of attrition became evident, the U-boats were utilised in a different way. A submarine blockade of the British Isles was plainly threatened by Admiral von Tirpitz towards the end of 1914; and the official announcement of it was made on February 4, 1915. By this document it was declared that on and after February 18, every British or French merchant vessel found in the waters of the ‘war region’ round these islands ‘will be destroyed, without its always being possible to warn the crews or passengers of the dangers threatening.’ Neutral ships, it was added, would not be attacked unless by mistake; but they are warned not to take the risk.

Those who know even a little of the history of our old wars will see at a glance that this is a new move in naval war policy, and one made by the Germans to get over certain difficulties which arise from the very nature of submarine boats, and which are especially embarrassing when the submarines belong to a navy decidedly inferior to its enemies at sea. The old and well-established rules of naval war laid down that you could only interfere with merchant shipping if it were engaged in carrying contraband of war. To ascertain whether the ship you had sighted was carrying contraband or not, you had to board and search her. If innocent, you must let her proceed on her voyage. If apparently guilty, you took over her men or otherwise placed them in safety, put a prize crew on board and sent her home to a port of your own, to be tried legally by a properly constituted tribunal called a Prize Court. If this Court decided that she was, in fact, carrying contraband, she was your prize. If you were forced by stress of circumstances to destroy the prize, instead of sending her into port, you took every care to remove everyone on board before doing so; and when you had not room for so many people, you released the prize rather than endanger or sacrifice the lives of non-combatants.

All these humane rules could well be observed by any ordinary cruiser; and they were, in fact, kept by the Emden and other German cruisers when harrying British commerce in the East. But it is obvious at the first glance that a submarine would be continually in difficulties over them. It would always be risky for so fragile and unhandy a vessel to board and search a big ship, which might prove to be armed with guns or bombs. No submarine could find room for merchant crews or passengers in her own small compartments, and no submarine could afford to spare a prize crew for even one prize, or the time and horse-power to tow her into port. In short, it was plain, from the first, that the legitimate cruiser game could not be played at all by submarine boats. The Government of the United States put the truth unanswerably in these words: ‘The employment of submarines for the destruction of enemy trade is of necessity completely irreconcilable with the principles of humanity, with the long existing undisputed rights of neutrals, and with the sacred privileges of non-combatants.’

‘Turning passengers and crews adrift in open boats.’

[See page [77].

The British Navy had an advantage here—the inestimable advantage of a force that could keep the sea against all its enemies. It was, therefore, possible for our submarines to stop an occasional ship with impunity, or to call up a destroyer and send a prize into port; and in the narrow waters of the Baltic and the Sea of Marmora, supply ships and merchantmen were captured and destroyed by them with every regard for the laws of humanity. But the German submarines had no fleet at sea to back their attempted blockade, and German war policy therefore took the downward course, hacking a way through the rules, and sacrificing, for the hope of victory, the very foundations of civilised human life. The U-boats began by turning passengers and crews adrift in open boats, no matter in what weather or how far from land. They went on to sink even great liners without search, and without warning; and they came finally down to the destruction of helpless men and women in boats, in order that the ships they had torpedoed might disappear without a trace—spürlos versenkt.

CHAPTER VI
SUBMARINE v. WAR-SHIP

The use of the submarine for attacking war-ships is, of course, perfectly legitimate, and the powers and possibilities of this weapon were much discussed before the War. Some writers of note believed that the day of the big battleship was practically over—that such vessels could be ‘pulled down’ with certainty by any enterprising submarine commander, without any corresponding risk to his own boat. Others, with cooler or more scientific heads, maintained that there is an answer to every weapon, and that the introduction of submarines would not change the principles of war. The result has shown that the latter school of opinion was right. The submarine has achieved some striking successes here and there against the larger ships of war, but has not rendered them obsolete or kept them from going about their true business, the control of the sea; and as time goes on, it is rather the submarine than the battle-ship which is found too vulnerable to challenge a fight, when neither has the advantage of surprise.

This legitimate use of the submarine formed part, as we have seen, of both British and German war policy—though, in our own case, it was originally considered rather as a means of defence against invasion; than of offence on the high seas. It was, therefore, not unnatural that the U-boat should score first. Besides, we were offering a hundred targets to one. Our cruisers were all over the North Sea, while no German ships could be met there except an occasional mine-layer like the Königin Luise. This state of things has only become more invariable as the War has developed; and the most remarkable result, so far, of the contest between the two submarine services is the practical equality of the score on the two sides. With infinitely fewer and more difficult chances, the British submarine has actually surpassed the U-boat’s record, in successes obtained against enemy ships of war, and immensely surpassed it in the proportion of successes to opportunities.

The first war-ship to fall to the torpedo of a submarine was the Pathfinder, a light cruiser of about 5,000 tons, with a complement of 268 officers and men, of whom some half were saved. The boat which sank her was the U. 21, commanded by Lieutenant Hersing, who raised high hopes in Germany which he was not destined to fulfil.

A greater captain is said to have been Captain Otto Weddigen, who achieved the sensational feat of pulling down three of our cruisers in one hour, and was supposed by some of his fellow-countrymen to have solved the problem of reducing the British Fleet to an equality with the German. But he owed more to luck and our inexperience than to any peculiar skill of his own. In the early morning of September 22, 1914, he stalked the armoured cruisers Aboukir, Hogue, and Cressy, old ships of 12,000 tons and 18 knots’ speed, which were out on patrol duty in the North Sea, and were about to take up their stations for the day’s work. The danger of the submarine was hardly yet fully recognised; and when the Aboukir was struck by a violent explosion, the general belief in the squadron was that she had run foul of a mine. She listed heavily and sank slowly, her funnels almost level with the water, and the smoke coming out as from the water’s edge. The other two ships closed her at once, and had got within two cables of her when the Hogue was struck in turn by two torpedoes almost simultaneously. The effect was extraordinary. ‘She seemed,’ says an eye-witness, ‘to give one jump out of the water and then to go straight down.’ So quickly did she go, that she was out of sight long before Aboukir, who took twenty minutes to sink, so that her men (as one of them said) ‘got time to do the best.’

The moment the Hogue was struck, it was realised that submarines were at work, and Cressy opened fire from one of her 9·2-in. guns. She was hit herself by two torpedoes immediately afterwards, and listed heavily, so that everything began to roll down the deck. But she sank slowly and her gunners kept up their fire most gallantly, giving up their chance of being saved for the hope of killing their enemy before they went down. They fired a dozen shots in all, and are said by Lieutenant Harrison to have sunk one of the attacking U-boats. ‘I reckon her gunners,’ said a survivor from the Aboukir, ‘were about the bravest men that ever lived. They kept up the firing until she had 40 degrees of list. They died gamely, did those fellows.’ Their shipmates were worthy of them. ‘There was absolutely no panic on the cruiser; the men were as calm as at drill.’ At last some trawlers came up; and, after two hours, some destroyers. Only 777 of the three ships’ crews were saved, out of a total of about 2,100; and 60 officers were lost out of 120. ‘Some of our men must have been in the water for three or four hours. The Aboukir men were taken to the Hogue; when the Hogue was sunk, they were taken to the Cressy; when the Cressy was taken, they were thrown in the sea again. Yet here they are, and there is only one thing they want—to go to sea again and have another whack at the men who torpedoed them.’

Possibly they had their wish; for some of them may have been on board the British ship which, a few months later, destroyed U. 29 (Weddigen’s boat) by a brilliant and almost reckless feat of seamanship, which, in later days, will form a favourite yarn of the Service.

The only other war-ship lost by submarine action in 1914 was the Hawke, an armoured cruiser twenty-five years old, which was torpedoed while on patrol in the North Sea, and sank in ten minutes, only seventy of those on board being saved. The year 1915 began badly for us, and ended by being decidedly our worst year on one side the account, though it was our best on the other. At 2 o’clock in the morning of January 1, a squadron of battle-ships, of the older types of 1901 and 1902, was steaming down Channel in line ahead. There was a gale blowing, and the sea was running high. The last two ships of the line were the London and the Formidable, the latter of which was suddenly shaken by a violent explosion, and not long afterwards by a second one. Even then, the ship did not sink till forty-five minutes after; and if it had not been for the rough weather and icy water, boats and rafts might have been got away with most of the crew. As it was, no steam-pinnaces could be got out, and the oars of the 42-foot cutter and other boats were nearly all smashed against the ship’s sides. The whole company, from the officers, giving quiet orders on the bridge, to the men smoking on the slant deck, behaved as if at manœuvres, and Captain Loxley, who went down with his ship, distinguished himself by signalling to the London not to stand by him, as there was a submarine about. One boat came ashore at Lyme Regis, with forty-six live men and nine dead in her; seventy more men were brought in after three hours’ hard and dangerous work by the 50-ton smack, Provident, of Brixham—William Pillar, skipper. His crew consisted of three men and a cook-boy. Out of a total complement of more than 700, only 201 were saved in all. Among the lost were thirty-four officers, including eight midshipmen and a sub-lieutenant.

On March 11, the Bayano, an armed merchant-cruiser, was torpedoed off the Firth of Clyde, and went down with 170 of her 200 men. On April 11, the Wayfarer transport was torpedoed, and ran ashore off Queenstown. On May 1, the Recruit, a small torpedo-boat of 385 tons, was sunk in the North Sea, with thirty-nine out of her sixty-four officers and men.

‘Were brought in by the 50-ton smack, Provident, of Brixham.’

Then came two grave losses on two consecutive days. The British Fleet off Gallipoli had already lost the Irresistible and Ocean by floating mines; and now the U-boats succeeded in inflicting another double loss on us, at a moment when the Army needed the strongest support to ensure success. On May 26, a single torpedo sank the Triumph, while she was co-operating with the Australian and New Zealand troops before Ari Burnu. She was accompanied by an escort of two destroyers, and was about to open fire when the submarine got a shot into her. She listed till her deck touched the water, and in five minutes capsized completely, but remained floating for twenty minutes, keel upwards. Some 460 of the officers and men were saved.

The Triumph was not designed for our Navy, but taken over from the builder’s yard, and the curious arch formed by her derricks made her outline a conspicuously foreign feature in our Fleet. The Majestic, on the other hand, which quickly followed her to destruction, was a typically British vessel, and gave her name to the whole class, built in 1895 and the following years, and then greatly admired. She also, on May 27, was supporting the army in action on the Gallipoli peninsula, when a German torpedo ended her twenty years’ career. She carried about 760 officers and men, but nearly all of them were saved. In June, two torpedo-boats, the Greenfly and Mayfly, of 215 tons, were sunk; the Roxburgh, a 10,000-ton cruiser, was slightly damaged; and the Lightning torpedo-boat, of 275 tons, was disabled, but brought into harbour. On August 8, a U-boat sank one of our large auxiliary cruisers, the India, off the coast of Norway and in Norwegian territorial waters. By this breach of the rules, she succeeded in killing 10 officers and 150 men, out of a complement of over 300.

The losses so far enumerated were all strictly naval losses. Up to this time, although we had been transporting troops by the hundred thousand from Canada and Australia to England, and from England to France, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Gallipoli, our numbers had hardly suffered the smallest diminution by submarine action. Again, during the last three years (1916–18) we have had minor losses now and then; but the one and only real disaster of this kind came upon us in 1915. On August 14, the British transport, the Royal Edward, was in the Ægean, carrying reinforcements for the 29th Division in Gallipoli, and details of the Royal Army Medical Corps, when she was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank rapidly. She had on board 32 military officers and 1,350 troops, in addition to her own crew of 220 officers and men. Of all these, only 600 were saved; and for the first time in modern war we suffered the cruel loss of soldiers to the strength of a whole battalion killed—not in battle, but helpless and unresisting, without the chance of firing a shot or delivering a last charge with the bayonet. The ship herself was a less harrowing loss; but she was a fine vessel that we could ill spare—a steel triple-screw steamer of 11,117 tons and 545 feet in length. She, like her sister ship, the Royal George, was originally built for the Egyptian Mail Steamship Company, and ran between Marseilles and Alexandria. Her later service was carrying the mails for the Canadian Northern Steamship Company between Avonmouth and Montreal—and now she had returned to Eastern waters, only to give an isolated and inconclusive triumph to a desperate enemy.

The remainder of the year saw many attempts by the U-boat commanders to repeat this success; but they mostly ended in failure. On September 2, the transport Southland was hit by a torpedo, but got into Madras under her own steam, with a loss of 30 men killed in the explosion. On September 19, the Ramazan, with 385 Indian troops on board, was shelled and sunk by a submarine, off Antikythera. In October, the transport Marquette was sunk in the Ægean. On November 3, the transport Mercian was heavily shelled, and had nearly 100 killed and wounded. On November 5 the Tara, armed boarding-steamer, was sunk in the Bay of Sollum, on the eastern border of Egypt; and immediately afterwards two small Customs cruisers—the Prince Abbas of 300 tons and the Abdul Moneim of 450—were sunk at the same place, and no doubt by the same pair of U-boats.

The year 1916 showed clearly that, as a weapon against armed ships, the U-boat was not likely to succeed, after the first period of surprise was past. During this year we lost three mine-sweepers—Primula, Clacton, and Genista; two empty transports—the Russian and Franconia; the Zaida and Duke of Albany, armed steamers of the auxiliary patrol; and one destroyer, the Lassoo, which was sunk with a loss of six men, either by mine or torpedo, off the coast of Holland. To this insignificant list must be added one disaster of a more serious kind. As we have already noted, our control of the North Sea was a continuous and effective control, and every effort was made, especially after the flight of the Germans from Jutland, to bring out the enemy fleet from its hiding-place. These efforts, of course, involved the exposure of our advanced forces to certain risks. On August 19, there was a report that the High Canal Fleet was at sea again. Hope outstripped belief, and light cruisers were sent out in every direction to find the enemy. Two of these, the Nottingham and the Falmouth—good ships of 5,400 and 5,250 tons—were torpedoed and sunk while scouting. Here again it was the loss of the men which we felt most. The ships were new and useful ones; but they could be replaced, and they belonged to a class in which the enemy’s force, since the battle of Jutland, had been deficient, almost to a disabling degree. There was no ground for the German hope that our naval superiority could be permanently whittled away by rare and fractional losses like these. Our Battle Fleet continued to hold up theirs, and our blockade of their coasts was in no degree weakened.

The record of 1917, and the first half of 1918, is even more significant. The German submarine effort was more and more completely diverted from legitimate to illegitimate war—from the attack on the enemy’s armed forces, to the destruction of non-combatants and neutrals in mercantile shipping of any kind. British destroyers, going everywhere, facing every kind of risk, and protecting everyone before themselves, now and again furnished an item to the German submarine bag; but the ‘regardless’ campaign against the world’s trade and the world’s tonnage was now the U-boats’ chief occupation. One legitimate objective they did still set before themselves—the destruction or hindrance of transport for the United States army between the shores of America and Europe. Again and again during 1917, and even in the earlier days of 1918, assurances were given to the German people by Admiral von Tirpitz, by Admiral von Capelle, by the Prussian Minister of Finance in the Diet, and by the chief military writers in the Press, that the promise of an American army was a boast and a deception, that the American troops could not and would not cross the Atlantic, because of the triumphant activity of the U-boats. Of the complete failure to make good these assurances no better account need be given than that supplied by the German Admiralty, in answer to the complaints of their own people. Towards the end of July 1918, when there was no longer any possibility of concealing the presence of a large and victorious American force in France, Admiral von Holtzendorff, the Admiralty Chief of Staff, gave the following explanation to the Kölnische Zeitung. He admitted the success of the Allies in improving oversea transport, especially the transport of troops from America. But in reply to the statement that there was in Germany much disappointment that the submarines had sunk so few of the American transports, he asked, with truly Prussian effrontery, how could submarines be specially employed against American transports. ‘The Americans,’ he said, ‘have at their disposition, for disembarkation, the coasts from the North of Scotland to the French Mediterranean ports, with dozens of landing-places. Ought we to let our submarines lie in wait before these ports, to see whether they can possibly get a shot at a strongly protected American transport, escorted by fast convoying vessels? The convoys do not arrive with the regularity and frequency of railway trains at a great station, but irregularly, at great intervals of time, and often at night or in a fog. Taking all this into consideration, it is evident how little prospect of success is offered for the special employment of submarines against American transports.’

This is all sound enough, and in fact the U-boats have only succeeded in killing 126 men out of the first million landed from America. But the argument of Admiral von Holtzendorff does not explain the official assurances by which the German public was deceived for more than a year, and it only partially explains the ill success of the U-boats. That could only be fully done by considering the offensive (or offensive-defensive) action of war-ship against submarine—which will be touched upon presently.

The record of the ‘bag’ made during the War by our own submarines has never yet been published in a complete form. Yet it is a most striking one, and ought effectually to remove any impression that the German Submarine Service is in any way superior—or even equal—to ours. In three years of war our boats sank over 300 enemy vessels. We lost, of course, many more; but when it is remembered that we were offering to our enemies every week more than four times as many targets as they offered us during the whole three years, it will be admitted that the comparison is not one to give them much ground for satisfaction. At present, however, this general comparison is not the one which we wish to make—we are concerned now with attacks on war-ships, or armed forces, and not on mercantile shipping. The greater part of our record is made up of such attacks, and it is now possible to give a short summary of them.

There have been, during this War, practically only three hunting-grounds where British submarines could hope to meet with enemy war-ships, transports, or supply ships. These are the North Sea, the Baltic, and the Dardanelles or Sea of Marmora. Of the work done by our submarines in the Baltic and Dardanelles we shall have separate accounts to give in later chapters. For the present, it is enough to tabulate the results. In the Baltic the bag included, besides a large number of steamers (some carrying iron ore for military use), the following war-ships: three destroyers, three transports, one old battleship or cruiser, one light cruiser, and one armed auxiliary. In the Dardanelles or Sea of Marmora were sunk or destroyed the following, besides a very large number of ships with stores or provisions for the troops in Gallipoli: two battle-ships, four gun-boats, one armed German auxiliary, seven transports, three ammunition ships and one ammunition train, destroyed by gunfire. We may add, as a note to these two parts of our record, that the work was done, not by a large number of submarines issuing in relays from a home base close at hand, and equipped with every kind of facility for repairing defects or relieving tired crews, but by an almost incredibly small number of boats, working far from their base, in closed waters, and under difficulties such as no German boat has ever successfully attempted to face.

There remains the North Sea patrol. The first success in this record stands against a famous name—that of Commander Max Horton, who (in his boat E. 9) afterwards established what has been called ‘The Command of the Baltic.’ In September 13, 1914, he was in the North Sea, near to enemy forces. He was submerged, and not in the happiest of circumstances, for one of his officers was ill, and to afford him some relief from the exhausted atmosphere below, it became imperatively necessary to rise to the surface. No sooner was the periscope above water, than the commander sighted a German light cruiser, the Héla, in a position where she might be expected to see the periscope and attack at any moment. Fortunately a torpedo-tube was loaded and bearing. Commander Horton took a snap-shot and dived. The shot went home, and the Héla troubled the patrol of E. 9 no more. On October 6, a German destroyer (S. 116) fell to another shot from the same hand.

After this, game was much scarcer. The German Admiralty tried to establish a paper command of the North Sea, kept up (for the benefit of the German public) by runaway raids on our East Coast towns; but anything like a regular patrol was impossible to discover. In the following eighteen months, however, our submarines did succeed in two attacks on stray German destroyers, and four on armed auxiliary vessels. Lieut.-Commander Benning (E. 5) hit an auxiliary in April 1915, but did not sink her. In June, Lieut.-Commander Moncrieffe hit another, the America, so badly that she was run ashore. In September, Commander Benning sank a third outright; and in December, Lieut.-Commander Duff-Dunbar (E. 16) secured a larger one of 3,000 tons. Of the destroyers, the first (V. 188) was got by Commander C. P. Talbot, in E. 16, on July 26; and the second on February 4, 1916, by Lieut.-Commander H. W. Shove, in E. 29. This was a boat of the ‘S. 138’ class, but she could not be further identified, nor did any British eye actually witness her final disappearance.

The rest of the bag is, for the most part, a forbidden subject. The items are many, the loss to the enemy was great; but as he is racking his brains to get or guess the details, it is no part of our business to help him. There are, however, two items of which we may speak with open satisfaction. One is the capture of a German trawler—of this we have already heard from the Admiral Commanding our Submarine Base, in Chapter IV. The simple story is that Lieut.-Commander G. Kellett, finding his boat (S. 1) so far disabled that she could not get home on her own engines, took over a German trawler by force, without attracting undue attention, and came safely into port, towed from enemy waters by an enemy boat. The remaining item hardly falls within our range; but though not submarine work, it is work actually done by a submarine, and may be classed, perhaps, with the destruction of the ammunition train by Lieut.-Commander Cochrane at Yarandji. On May 4, 1916, a Zeppelin (L. 7) fell to Lieut.-Commander F. E. B. Feilman, in E. 31, and he brought home seven of her crew as prisoners.

Even this is not all. In 1916, our submarines inflicted on the German Fleet itself four blows, which, though they were none of them actually fatal, must yet have been extremely damaging to the nerve of the Service, and certainly cost heavily for repairs both in time and labour. On August 19, the Westfalen—a battle-ship of 18,000 tons, built in 1908—was torpedoed by Lieut.-Commander Turner, in E. 23. On October 19, Lieut.-Commander Jessop severely damaged the light cruiser München, of 3,200 tons; and on November 5, Commander Lawrence (in J. 1) achieved the brilliant feat of torpedoing two German Dreadnoughts—the Grosser Kurfurst, which was laid down in 1913 and finished since the War began, and the Kronprinz, which was both laid down and commissioned since August 1914. A success of this kind, though not final, may well be set against the sinking of much older and more vulnerable ships, like the Formidable, Triumph, and Majestic; and it must be remembered that the disappearance of these three from our Navy List, however regrettable, had absolutely no effect on the relative strength of the British and German Battle Fleets; whereas the loss, for some months at any rate, of two great Dreadnoughts like the Grosser Kurfurst and Kronprinz—coming as it did shortly after the Jutland losses—carried the inferiority of Admiral von Scheer’s force to the point of impotence. In the match of submarine against war-ship, our boats had succeeded where the U-boats had signally failed.

CHAPTER VII
WAR-SHIP v. SUBMARINE

The story of the contest between our war-ships and their new enemy, the submarine, is the story of a most remarkable and successful adaptation. Of the six principal methods of defence used by our Navy at the end of the fourth year of war, three are old and three new; and it is a striking proof of the scientific ability of the Service, that the three old methods have been carefully reconsidered, and that, instead of abandoning them because, in their original use, they were apparently obsolete, our officers have turned them to even better account than the new inventions.

The oldest device for the protection of war-ships against torpedoes—whether fired by torpedo-boats or submarines—is the net. Our older battle-ships, as everyone will remember, were fitted with a complete set of steel nets on both sides, and with long booms for hanging them out. These booms, when not in use, were lashed diagonally along the ship’s sides, like great stitches, and gave the typical vessels of the British Fleet a peculiar and decidedly smart appearance. Very smart, too, was the quickness and precision with which the order ‘Out torpedo nets!’ was executed; but—long before 1914—everyone was perfectly aware that the nets were practically as much out of date as masts and sails. They were so heavy, and hung so low in the water, that no ship could manœuvre in them, and even for a fleet at anchor they had ceased to be a trustworthy defence; for the Whitehead torpedo was now fitted with cutters which could shear a way through the steel meshes.

Nets of the old type, therefore, have played no part in the present War—unless we are to believe the Turkish account of the sinking of the Ocean in the Dardanelles, according to which the nets were out, and were not only useless as a protection, but dragged down some of our men when they might otherwise have escaped by swimming. But, because one type of net is obsolete, the British Navy has seen no reason to reject all nets as impracticable. It is not beyond imagination to conceive a net so light and large of mesh, that it will diminish by no more than one knot the speed of the ship which carries it, and will yet catch and deflect a torpedo in the act of passing through it. For it must be remembered that the real problem is not how to stop a torpedo in its full 30-knot career, but how to prevent it from striking the ship with its head at an angle not too fine for the detonator to be fired. A turn of the helm, or the mere wave from the cut-water of a fast ship, has often sent a torpedo running harmlessly away along the quarter. The net of the future may be found equally successful in catching the fish by its whiskers and turning it forward along the bow, where the same wave will drive it outwards from the ship’s course.

The second familiar means of defence was the gun. Here again there was a temptation to despair. The secondary armament of any battle-ship or cruiser was fairly certain to make short work of a torpedo-boat, or of a submarine visible upon the surface. But no living gunner had ever fired at the periscope of a submarine—a mark only two feet, at most, out of the water, and only four inches in diameter. To see such an object at, say, 1,000 yards, was difficult; to hit it might well seem impossible. Yet 1,000 yards was but one-tenth of the possible range at which a modern submarine might fire its torpedo.

Nevertheless the use of the gun was not discarded; and two important discoveries were made in consequence. The first of these was that gunfire may be distant, wild, or even unaimed, and yet have an excellent effect. The existence of a submarine is so precarious—its chance of surviving a single direct hit is so slight—that the mere sound of a gun will almost always be enough to make it submerge completely—unless it can engage the enemy, with superior gun-power, at a range of its own choosing. When Captain Weddigen had already hit the Aboukir, the Hogue, and the Cressy, and all three were sinking, the sound of the Cressy’s guns was enough to cause his disappearance, though it is very improbable that the shooting was really dangerous; for the listing of the ship was rapid, and according to eye-witnesses, the gallant gunners were soon firing in the air. Since then, the same thing has been repeatedly observed; and some brilliant successes by our patrol-boats and trawlers have shown that the U-boat has every right to be nervous when it hears even a 6-pounder talking English.

The other discovery is a much more recent one. As soon as it was once recognised that a torpedo is just as innocuous when deflected, as when stopped or evaded, the idea was sure to strike the handiest gunners in the world that they might use their weapons to disturb the straightforwardness of the fish’s onset. Even thirty knots is nothing to the velocity of a modern shell, and without hoping for a direct hit on an object from six to twenty-two feet under water, it was thought possible to give a twist to the torpedo’s nose sufficient to make a potential hit into a miss or a glancing shot. This feat was actually performed by the gunners of the Justitia, who, with splendid coolness, shot at torpedoes as sportsmen used to shoot at oncoming tigers, and succeeded in killing or diverting several, only to fall at last before the rush of numbers.

‘She had gone full speed for the enemy, and rammed him.’

A third weapon of the war-ship was the ram; and the use of this, being an offensive-defensive method, was the best of all, as we shall see presently. It was, from the beginning, present to the mind of every naval man, for A. 1 (our very first submarine) was lost, with all hands, in May, 1904, by being accidentally rammed in the act of submerging. It happened, too, that the first attack made by a submarine against British war-ships in the present War was beaten by this method. On August 9, 1914, a squadron of our light cruisers sighted the periscope of a German U-boat, which had succeeded in approaching to within short range of them. In the account of the affair published at the time, we were informed that H.M.S. Birmingham had sunk the submarine by a direct hit on the periscope, and that this was the only shot fired. Some time afterwards, the truth became known—the Birmingham had to her credit, not an impossible feat of gunnery, but a brilliant piece of seamanship. She had gone full speed for the enemy, and rammed him. Her captain was not led to do this by inspiration or desperation, but by a scientific knowledge of the elements in the problem. Without stopping to think afresh, he knew that a submarine takes a certain time to dive to a safe depth, and that his own ship, at 27 knots, would cover a good 900 yards of sea in one minute. When his eye measured the distance of that periscope, he saw that—given straight steering—the result was a mathematical certainty.

The new methods introduced during the War are also three in number. Of one—the use of dazzle-painting—we have already heard. It is, of course, a purely defensive measure, intended to deceive the eye at the periscope by misrepresenting the ship’s size, distance, and course. Another deceptive device is the phantom ship or dummy. A vessel of comparatively small size and value is covered more or less completely with a superstructure of light wood-work, with sham funnels, turrets and big guns, so that she has all the appearance of a battle-cruiser or Dreadnought. The U-boat may run after her, or run from her, according to his feeling at the moment; but, in either case, he will be wasting his time and laying up disappointment for himself. In May, 1915, during the Gallipoli campaign, the Germans spent a certain amount of time and trouble in torpedoing a ship which they supposed to be H.M.S. Agamemnon, and in their illustrated propaganda sheets they give a picture of that ship as one of the victims of the irresistible U-boats. For a short time the story was believed inside Constantinople, and Mr. Lewis Einstein, of the American Embassy there, relates in his diary that this success, coming (as it appeared to do) immediately after the sinking of the Triumph and Majestic, was almost more than he could bear. Fortunately for his peace of mind, he soon discovered the truth. The supposed Agamemnon was a dummy, and lay for some time near the entrance of the Dardanelles, with her false turrets and sham guns, exposed to the view of friends and foes on the two shores. Very possibly this dummy received a shot which might otherwise have been successfully directed against a genuine battle-ship, and the deception was thus really useful. The German cunning is expended in a very different direction. Its object is often to deceive their own people as to what has actually been lost, not to avert a possible loss at our hands. Thus when the super-submarine Bremen was sunk on her outward voyage for America, one dummy Bremen after another was ostentatiously brought home to a German port, as if returning from a successful Atlantic passage. A more flagrant instance still was the statement that, among the German losses in the Battle of Jutland, was the sinking of the Pommern, a small and obsolete battle-ship of 13,000 tons, built in 1905. The British Admiralty, who knew that that older Pommern had been sunk in the Baltic by Commander Max Horton, nearly a year before, had no difficulty in identifying the Pommern lost at Jutland with a new Dreadnought of the largest type, commissioned since her predecessor’s destruction and christened by her name—either then or at the moment when it became necessary to put a good face on their disasters in the battle. It is to be hoped that this state of things may continue on both sides. The Germans are welcome to our phantom ships, if we thereby save our real ones; while, if we can sink their real ones, we may well be content to hear them given imaginary names. The two Services have different ideas of what is a useful dummy.

The newest method of preserving ships from the torpedo is a purely constructional device, and very little can be said of it here. But we have been allowed to know this much—the Marlborough was torpedoed at Jutland, but returned to the line of battle within nine minutes, fought for three hours, and eventually came home under her own steam, defeating a submarine attack on the way. We are not told how this very satisfactory result is attained in the construction of a Dreadnought of 25,000 tons, capable of full battle-ship speed. It cannot be by the mere addition of the bulging compartments known as ‘blisters,’ for in the older cruisers in which these were tried they were found to cause too great a sacrifice of speed. The result, however, is there; and there can be no doubt that as the number of unsinkable ships increases, the activity of the U-boat will be very greatly discouraged.

But it would be contrary to the principles of war and the genius of our Navy, to rely upon purely defensive measures to defeat the submarine enemy. It is sometimes said that the U-boat campaign took us by surprise. So far as this applies to the legitimate use of the submarine against war-ships, the statement is quite untrue. The campaign against merchant shipping and non-combatant passengers, waged in defiance of all international law and common humanity, did certainly take us by surprise; and it is only to our credit, and the discredit of our enemies, that their barbarity was beyond our imagination. But the efforts of the U-boats against our fleet were, as we have shown in a previous chapter, actually less successful than our own attacks upon theirs, and our tacticians were never for a moment at a loss to deal with them. The principles had been thought out long ago. As early as 1907, the distinguished admiral who writes over the name ‘Barfleur’ clearly stated his belief that ‘the untried submarine’ was not likely to prove more effective than the torpedo-boat and destroyer in depriving our Battle Fleet of the control of the sea. ‘Nothing is more to be deprecated,’ he added, ‘than the attempt which has been made to enhance unduly its importance, by playing on the credulity of the public. The new instrument of war has no doubt a value, but that it is anything more than an auxiliary, with limited and special uses, is difficult to believe.’ And he turned back to old and tried principles: ‘The traditional role of the British Navy is not to act on the defensive, but to prepare to attack the force which threatens.’ In September, 1914, when Weddigen’s coup showed that the moment had come, ‘Barfleur’ was among the first to attack the new problem tactically—he saw at once that the war-ship’s best defence lies in the offensive power given by her immense superiority in speed and weight. And if the single ship is formidable to the submarine, a squadron is still more so. By its formation, its manœuvres, its pace and its ramming power, it reverses the whole situation—the hunter becomes the hunted, and must fly like a wolf from a pack of wolf-hounds, every one more powerful than itself.

There remains, of course, the question of the best formation for the squadron to adopt. Upon this point there are more opinions than one, and a conversation may be reported in which the merits of line abreast and line ahead were set against one another by two naval officers, and both put out of court by a third. The first two were captains commanding ships in two different squadrons. They argued the question between them with great seriousness; but in so cool and abstract a manner, that the spectator might be pardoned for suspecting—rightly or wrongly—that they were supporting doctrines which were not personal to themselves but derived from higher authority—perhaps from their respective admirals, both men of great ability and experience. It was noticeable, too, that the admiral at whose table the disputants were sitting, and who himself commanded yet another squadron, maintained an attitude of neutrality; though it is certain that he and his own officers, several of whom were present, had often discussed the problem, and were probably agreed upon the answer to it.

‘Speed,’ said Captain A, ‘seems to be the key to the solution. It is only in line ahead that speed helps you—in fact gives you something like practical safety. If a torpedo, fired at a column in line ahead, misses the ship it is aimed at, it is very unlikely to be so wide a shot as to hit either the next ahead or next astern—it is a miss directly it crosses the line.’

Captain B remained perfectly grave, but he looked very well content with this argument. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘theoretically; but, in fact, the contrary has happened. In a column of eight ships, in line ahead, the London and the Formidable were the last two. You remember that the torpedo which sank the Formidable was believed to have been meant for the London. And anyhow, speed and stormy weather failed to save the rear ship.’

‘The speed was insufficient,’ replied Captain A, ‘not worth calling speed. When your fleet is in line abreast, columns disposed astern, the theoretical chances of hitting are much greater. Speed is no advantage in such a formation—in fact it may be a positive disadvantage. It may actually increase the virtual target. A shot which misses the near ship of a line abreast may still hit one of the others.’

‘Laurence,’ said Captain B, ‘when he fired at the Moltke, considered her, as wing ship of the squadron, to be his only chance.’

‘There was no second line disposed astern,’ replied Captain A; ‘but even so, if his torpedo had just missed, ahead of the Moltke, the next or next but one in the line might have come forward just in time to receive the shot.’

‘That,’ said Captain B, ‘is a mere question of time and distance; and, in anything like ordinary circumstances, you would not get your result. Say the ships are three cables apart, and doing only fifteen knots. The torpedo is going double the speed; but by the time it has run the three cables along the line, the next ship will have gone one and a half cables ahead and be past the danger point.’

‘Your ship may be zigzagging,’ replied Captain A, ‘and run right into it. Line ahead has the advantage there—in fact, speaking generally, I have the power, which you have not, of immediate deployment in any direction. I can avoid mines, or turn away from the submarine altogether.’

‘Certainly,’ said Captain B, looking again quite well content, ‘but you would not turn away in any case—you would best defend yourself by attacking the submarine.’

Captain A hesitated a moment. ‘Yes,’ he replied at last, ‘but in line abreast your attack might be positively dangerous to yourself. Suppose your columns in line abreast to be zigzagging, as they probably would be, and imagine one of your ships to put her helm the wrong way—there would inevitably be a collision.’

‘I cannot imagine such a thing,’ said Captain B.

‘I appeal to the Admiral,’ said Captain A.

It seemed an embarrassing thing, for a host and superior officer, to be called upon to give judgment between his guests on so serious an argument. But the Admiral was not in the least embarrassed. He did not even express his own opinion, which was thought to favour Captain B. ‘Let me remind you,’ he said, ‘that you have not examined the most important witness in the case—the commander of the submarine. What order is the most dangerous for the submarine to meet? I asked Commander C, one of our best E-boat officers, this question lately, and he replied “Quarter-line, undoubtedly.”’

He turned to the only landsman present, and reminded him that in a quarter-line, or bow-and-quarter line, the ships are echeloned each upon the quarter of the next ahead instead of directly astern. He added, ‘A will say that this is in his favour, because ships in a quarter-line are really in line ahead, only that each one in turn is a little out of the straight. And B will claim that he wins, because a quarter-line is merely a line abreast in which each ship lags a little more behind the true front. And C will tell us that the only thing which matters is that the quarter-line gives the unhappy submarine less chance of hitting, and more chance of being sunk than either of the other two formations. And thereupon the Court is adjourned.’

CHAPTER VIII
BRITISH SUBMARINES IN THE BALTIC

The story of our submarine campaign in the Baltic is the first of two romances of the sea—one Northern and one Southern—the like of which is not to be found in the annals of the last 300 years. War must often make us familiar with obscure or long-forgotten places, the scenes of old voyages, and battles long ago; but to adventure with our submarines into the Baltic, or the Sea of Marmora, is to slip through unimagined dangers into a legendary world beyond all history—sailing the seas of the past, with the captains of the future. The exploration under water of those intricate and perilous channels was alone a discovery of supreme skill and daring; and the brilliant acts of war achieved by the adventurers form only a minor part of the glory of being there at all.

The first of our submarine voyagers in the Baltic was Lieut.-Commander Max Horton, in E. 9. Before the War was a year old his fame had spread far and wide; but the details of his success are not even yet generally known, and cannot be given here. By October 6, 1914, he had sunk a German light cruiser and a destroyer, both in the ‘North Sea,’ and it may perhaps be guessed that he had, at any rate, thought of penetrating into the Baltic. By January, 1915, he was a full Commander, and had received the D.S.O. On the 29th of that month, he was not only in the Baltic, but was sinking a destroyer there; on May 11, he bagged a transport; and on June 5, he put to the credit of E. 9 another transport and another destroyer. Finally, on July 2, he torpedoed the Pommern, a 13,000-ton battle-ship of an older type, but armed with 11-inch guns.

On July 29, he slipped again, in company with E. 1 (Commander N. F. Laurence), and after some independent hunting, the two boats both arrived at Reval. E. 9 had attacked a cruiser and a submarine; and, on August 18, had had a covetous look at a squadron of battle-cruisers, detailed for the German attack on the Gulf of Riga. But as they were moving constantly in regular formation, and at high speed over a large area, it was not possible to deal satisfactorily with them. E. 1, however, had had better luck. On August 19, Commander Laurence came to observation depth at 8.0 A.M., and under cover of a fog succeeded in stalking the same squadron. They were manœuvring in line abreast, and within ten minutes came across E. 1’s bows, with destroyers on both flanks. Commander Laurence had, of course, only a single ship to aim at—the battle-cruiser on the wing nearest to him, which was ascertained to have been the Moltke, a 22,600-ton ship. At 8.20, he fired his starboard torpedo, and at the same moment dived to avoid a destroyer which was coming straight for him. His luck was good, both ways. The torpedo got home on the battle-cruiser, and the destroyer missed E. 1 by a few feet. The next day he reported to the Russian Admiral at Reval.

These two boats were followed, on August 15, by E. 8 and E. 13. The fate of E. 13 will not be forgotten while there is any rightful indignation left in Europe. On August 19, she got ashore on a neutral coast—the Danish island of Saltholm—and there, with her crew upon her, was deliberately shot to pieces by a German war-ship, in defiance of all humanity and international law. Her officers and men behaved with perfect courage, but many of them were killed before they could get away from the wreck of their boat.

Lieut.-Commander Goodhart’s account of the voyage of E. 8 is a plain and business-like document, but to read it, with a map beside it, is to look far away into a world of historic names and ever-present dangers. It is easy enough to imagine the passage up the Skager-Rak, always remembering that we must keep well out of the central line of traffic, and that in the afternoon we have to dive and pass under a whole fleet of steam trawlers. At 7 P.M. it is possible to come to the surface again. The Commander orders full speed, rounds the Skaw, and enters the Kattegat. In the fading twilight, several merchant-steamers are seen going north. The shore and island lights twinkle out one by one—Hamnskar, Vinga, Skaw, Trindelen, and Anholt. The night is short. By 3.0 A.M. we must dive again, and lie quietly on shoal ground, while the traffic goes over us. At 5.25 A.M. we venture to the surface, but are put down quickly by a steamer. At 7.0 we venture again, and do a scurry of 1½ hours in a friendly mist. Then down again, and crawl at 3 knots, till at 1.0 P.M. we are off the entrance to the Sound.

Here Commander Goodhart has to make the choice between going forward submerged, or waiting for darkness and then attempting the channel on the surface. He is confident of being able to get to his position under water, and decides accordingly to continue diving into the Sound and wait for night inside. He proceeds at fifty feet, and, by 3.6 P.M., has verified his position, coming up to twenty-one feet to do so. He goes down again to fifty feet, and alters course to pass through the northern narrows. At 4.10 P.M. he is east of Helsingör Light—‘By thy wild and stormy steep, Elsinore!’ At 5.20, after another observation, he goes to bottom in eleven fathoms, feeling comfortably certain that he has not been detected—so far—on his passage.

At 8.15 P.M. he rises to the surface. The Danish shore is bright with many lights, the Swedish shore is dark—all is exactly as it may have been a century and more ago, when Nelson was there on his way to his great battle. E. 8 goes south-westward on the surface, altering course to avoid being seen by two destroyers, who are going north, along the Danish shore, at a great pace. One of them suddenly turns south, but then stops, as if in doubt. E. 8 runs on into still more dangerous waters; the lights of Copenhagen are blazing brightly, and in Middle Ground Fort a searchlight is working. Now and again it strikes the submarine. Then come several fishing-boats, then two red lights in a small craft going south, close over to the Danish shore. She is on our starboard beam for some time, but luckily not near enough to see us, and we head boldly for Flint Channel.

Off Malmo, the shore lights are dazzling, and it is extremely hard to fix a position. There are many fishing-boats about, each carrying two bright lights. The Commander orders the boat to be trimmed down, with upper deck awash, and proceeds with one engine only, at seven knots. He steadies his course through Flint Channel, passing at least twenty vessels towards the western end of it, some carrying two and some three white lights, and one making searchlight signals in the air. The majority of the fishing-boats are no sooner avoided by a change of course, than we run past a small tramp showing a green light, and then three white ones. She seems to have anchored; but two other vessels have to be dodged, and then the ship which has been signalling with searchlight. Immediately afterwards, when just N.E. of the Lightship, with her three vertical red lights, a small torpedo-boat or trawler sights us as we creep by within 200 yards of her. Probably it is the searchlight in Copenhagen which has shown us up. Anyhow it is tally-ho at last!

She lights red and green flares, and alters course in our direction. We dive, and strike bottom—‘very strong bottom’—at nineteen feet on gauge, which immediately decreases to fourteen feet. At fourteen feet, then, we try to proceed on our course; but the ground is fearfully uneven, and a succession of bumps brings us to a dead stop. It is 11.40 P.M. After an anxious quarter of an hour, the Commander rises to the surface. The Drogden Lightship is on our starboard quarter. A large destroyer or small cruiser is ahead of us, showing lights—she is the one who had made searchlight signals. She is only two hundred yards away, but the Commander trims E. 8 deep, and steals past on motors. Four minutes this takes, and we then find a destroyer right ahead, and only one hundred yards from us. There is nothing for it but to dive. Down we go to twenty-three feet on gauge; but at sixteen feet the boat strikes bottom heavily on the starboard side, carrying away all blades of the starboard propeller. We lie on the bottom and listen to our pursuers overhead.

Life is now a matter of minutes and feet. At 12.15, the boat goes down to eighteen feet, but is still bumping badly. At 12.19, Commander Goodhart stops her and comes silently to the surface. The destroyer is there, close on our starboard beam. At 12.20, we dive again, as slowly as we dare, and at seventeen feet we glide away on our course, the depth of water mercifully increasing as we go. For a long time we seem to be escaping. Then, at 2.10 A.M., we strike bottom again at eighteen feet. An hour more, and we rise to the surface, only to see the destroyer on our port beam. Happily she is now a mile off, and does not see us. When we come up again, at 7.15, there is nothing in sight. At 8.53 we dive for a steamer, and at 10.40 for a destroyer. E. 8 is nearly out of breath now—her battery is running very low.

Commander Goodhart decides to find a good depth, go to the bottom, and lie there till darkness gives him a chance of recharging. From 10.40 A.M. till 6.40 P.M. we lie like a stone in twenty-three fathoms.

At 6.40 a Swedish steamer is still patrolling ahead. At 8.25 P.M. a patrol of three vessels is close astern, and very slowly moving east. The moon is too bright for us and we dive again. At 9.30 we try once more, but are put down by a shadowy destroyer to the southward. At last, ten minutes before midnight, we find a bit of sea where we and the boat can breathe in peace.

But only for two hours; daylight comes early in northern waters. It is now August 20. At 2.0 A.M. we dive again, and lie in seventeen fathoms, spending time and imagination upon the chart. We are well out of the Sound now, and clear of the Swedish coast. On our starboard beam lies the island of Rügen, where we shall never make holiday again; further back, on our quarter, is the channel that leads to Lübeck and to Kiel, which we hope to visit yet. Right ahead is the island of Bornholm, which we must pass unperceived, and beyond it the whole expanse of the Baltic lies open.

Commander Goodhart rises to the surface at 9.0 A.M., but dives again at noon. We are now not far west of Rönne; and as he wishes to make sure of passing Bornholm unobserved, he decides to remain on the bottom till dark, then slip by and recharge his batteries, for a long run north by daylight. By 7.0 P.M. we are on our way, and eight hours later we are passing the east coast of the great island of Gotland. At 9.2 P.M. we dive for a light cruiser, which passes overhead forward; at 10.0 we return to the surface and proceed north-east, running past the entrance to the Gulf of Riga and the island of Oesel. By 1.0 A.M. on August 22, we have to dive for daylight; but by 3.0 we are up again, and going on our course full speed. At 8.30 A.M. we sight Dagerört ahead and join E. 9 (Commander Max Horton). In company with her and with a Russian destroyer, we pass into the entrance of the Gulf of Finland; and by 9.0 P.M., E. 8 is secured in Reval harbour. Within twenty-four hours, Commander Goodhart has docked and overhauled her, replaced her broken propeller, and reported her ready for sea.

The career of E. 8 in the Baltic was long and successful. It began, so far as sinkings are concerned, with the destruction of the steamer Margarette of Königsberg by gunfire, on October 5, 1915, and the most exciting day in the record was October 23, when the Prinz Adalbert, a cruiser of nearly 9,000 tons, fell to her first shot. E. 8 was cruising off Libau when, at 8.50 A.M., Commander Goodhart observed smoke on the horizon, and altered course to intercept the ship which was soon seen to be an enemy. She had three funnels and two very high masts, and was going west with two destroyers, zigzagging—one on each bow.

Commander Goodhart ran on, at seven and a half knots, till he got within 3,000 yards, when he eased to five knots in order to lessen his wake. The wind was slight, from S.S.E., and there was bright sunlight. The conditions were ideal for an attack from the southward. All tubes were made ready; the enemy came on at an estimated speed of fifteen knots. At 9.28 the port destroyer passed ahead; four minutes later, Commander Goodhart fired his bow tube at the war-ship’s fore-bridge and began to look out for results.

They came. After one minute he observed a very vivid flash on the water-line at the point of aim. This was immediately followed by a very heavy concussion, and the entire ship was hidden instantly in a huge column of thick grey smoke. Evidently the torpedo had exploded the fore magazine. The sky was filled with debris, and the smaller bits began falling in the water near the submarine. There was no use in spending time on the surface, and in one minute more, E. 8 was sliding down to fifty feet, where she stayed for eight minutes, to give the rest of the ship ample time to come down. At 9.42 Commander Goodhart rose to twenty feet, and took a survey through his periscope. There was no sign of the Prinz Adalbert. The two destroyers had closed on to the scene of the explosion, but it was not likely that they had been able to find any survivors, for the destruction of the ship had been instantaneous and complete. Commander Goodhart decided not to attack them, because, for all he knew, they were ignorant of his presence; if so, they might very probably imagine the damage to have been done by a mine, and give him future opportunities. The shot had been a long one, about 1,300 yards, and this was in the circumstances particularly fortunate; for at a shorter distance, such as 500 or 600 yards, the submarine herself would have felt a tremendous shock from the double explosion.

An hour later he saw four destroyers hovering about the place of the wreck. He turned away, and they made no attempt to follow. At dawn next day he reported by wireless, and then proceeded to his base.

In the meantime E. 19, Lieut.-Commander F. N. Cromie, had arrived. She set to work in earnest upon the German shipping engaged in the service of the naval and military departments of the enemy, towards the western end of the Baltic. Monday, October 11, was her best day, and the beginning of a downright panic in the Hamburg trade. ‘8.0 A.M.,’ says Lieut.-Commander Cromie, ‘started to chase merchant shipping.’ He had good hunting. At 9.40 A.M. he stopped the Walter Leonhardt, from Lulea to Hamburg, with iron ore. The crew abandoned ship, and were picked up by a Swedish steamer, considerately stopped for the purpose. A gun-cotton charge then sent the empty vessel to the bottom. By noon, E. 19 was chasing the Germania of Hamburg, signalling her to stop immediately. In spite of the signals and a warning gun-shot, she continued to bolt, and soon ran ashore. Lieut.-Commander Cromie went alongside cautiously to save her crew, but found that they had already abandoned ship. He tried to tow her off, but failed to move her—small wonder, for her cargo consisted of nearly three million kgs. of the finest concentrated iron ore, from Stockholm to Stettin. He left her filling with water, and at 2.0 gave chase to the Gutrune. By 3.0 he had towed her crew to the Swedish steamer, and started her for the bottom with her 4,500,000 kgs. of iron ore, from Lulea to Hamburg.

The game went forward merrily. At 4.25 he began to chase two more large steamers going south. In twenty minutes he had stopped one—the Swedish boat Nyland, with ore for Rotterdam and papers all correct—told her to proceed, and ten minutes later caught the Direktor Rippenhagen, with magnetic ore from Stockholm to Nadenheim. While she was sinking he stopped another Swede bound for Newcastle, and gave her the Direktor’s crew to take care of. An hour later, he proceeded to chase a large steamer, the Nicomedia, who tried to make off towards the Swedish coast. A shot across her bows brought her to a more resigned frame of mind. She proved to be a large and extremely well-fitted vessel, carrying six to seven million kgs. of magnetic ore from Lulea to Hamburg. The crew were sent ashore in boats, and E. 19 proceeded up the west of Gotland. Her cruise was marked by one more incident—a significant one. During the morning of October 12, Lieut.-Commander Cromie stopped the Nike, and went alongside to examine her. He found her to be in iron ore from Stockholm to Stettin, under command of Captain Anderson, whose passport, from the Liverpool Police, proved him to be a Swede. To a Hun, this would have made no difference; but Lieut.-Commander Cromie had British ideas on international law. He sent Lieutenant Mee on board with a prize crew of two men, in the good old style of our ancestors, and ordered them to take the prize into Reval for further investigation. After what we have already said about submarines and war policy, the point needs no pressing. War against trading vessels and non-combatants is possible within the rules, but only in certain circumstances. Even where those circumstances exist, there is no excuse for breaking the rules; and where they do not exist, only a barbarian would hack his way through the net of international law and common humanity. Our Navy has in all circumstances kept both these laws: the German submarines have deliberately and cruelly broken both.

Lieut.-Commander Cromie continued to have the good fortune he deserved. He ended the 1915 campaign with another war-ship in his bag. Cruising in the Western Baltic on the morning of November 7, he sighted a light cruiser and two destroyers, but was disappointed in his attempt to attack. Three hours later, at 1.20, in a favourable mist, he had a second chance. A light cruiser—perhaps the same—with one destroyer in attendance, came on at fifteen knots, steaming south and east. He dived at once, and at 1.45 fired his starboard torpedo. The range was about 1,100 yards, and the shot went home on the cruiser’s starboard side forward. She immediately swung round in a large circle and then stopped dead. She appeared to be on fire and sinking. But Lieut.-Commander Cromie was unwilling to leave her in uncertainty. He avoided the destroyer, passed under her stern, and manœuvred for a second shot. This was fired at 1,200 yards, and was aimed at the cruiser’s main-mast, just abaft of which it actually struck. A double explosion followed. Evidently the after magazine had blown up, and several large smoking masses were shot out some 200 yards in the direction of the submarine. The destroyer then opened a heavy fire on the periscope with H.E. shell. Down went E. 19 for her life; but three minutes later, she was up again to see what was happening. The cruiser—she was the Undine of 2,650 tons—was gone. The destroyer was picking up a few survivors, and after a restless half-hour made off to the southward, leaving on the scene only a ferry-boat flying the German mercantile flag. Lieut.-Commander Cromie left also, and arrived next day at Reval, where he reported the attack and added that, under existing weather conditions, it was only rendered possible by the sound judgment and prompt action of Lieutenant G. Sharp, who was officer of the watch at the time.

E. 19 was not alone in her successful campaign against the German iron-ore trade. A week after her fine break recorded above, E. 9 arrived on the scene; and Commander Max Horton, in two successive days, sank the Soderham, Pernambuco, Johannes-Russ, and Dall-Asfen—four serious losses to the German gun factories, and even more serious blows to the courage of their carrying trade. The captain of the Nike told Lieutenant Mee on his voyage to Reval, that after E. 19’s first raid no less than fifteen ships were held up at Lulea, awaiting convoys; and after E. 9’s success, the command of the Baltic seemed to have passed for the time out of German hands.

Such a state of things could not, of course, be continuously maintained—the Baltic weather alone made that impossible. E. 1, E. 8, and E. 18 followed their leaders, and all did good service during the autumn; but their reports show how severe were the conditions when the winter really set in. E. 9 had already noted very bad weather in November, and on the 25th ‘boat became covered with a large quantity of ice.’ On January 10, 1916, E. 18, commanded by Lieut.-Commander R. C. Halahan, reports ‘temperature very low: sea very rough; great difficulty in keeping conning-tower hatch clear of ice, as sea came over constantly and froze at once.’ Two days later she proceeded to Reval in company with a Russian ice-breaker. ‘The ice was very thick in places, but no difficulty was experienced in getting through.’ These hindrances continued for months. As late as April 28, we find E. 18 accompanied through Moon Sound by an ice-breaker ‘as there were occasional thick ice-fields.’ The next day some of these ice-fields came drifting down upon the anchorage, and E. 18 had to slip and anchor off until night. Even so, she could not be sure of escaping all danger; for the ice brought down large masses of stone, and deposited them in the channels.

‘The Russian ice-breakers freed them from the harbour ice.’

[See page [123].

In spite of all difficulties and hardships, our submarines continued their campaign indomitably, and would no doubt at this hour still hold the mastery of the Baltic trade, if the collapse of our Russian friends had not deprived them of their bases and rendered their operations useless. Early in April, 1917, it became evident that Finland must fall into German hands, and steps were taken to withdraw our naval force from the Baltic. But, for the boats themselves, there could be no return from the scene of their voyages and victories. They lay ice-bound in the harbour of Helsingfors, and there they must end their unparalleled story, for surrender to an enemy so unworthy was not to be thought of.

As soon, then, as official news came of the landing of German troops at Hango, these famous adventurers were led to their last rendezvous. The Russian ice-breakers freed them from the harbour ice. All the Russian officers who had been attached to the British flotilla, and who were then in Helsingfors, offered their assistance for the funeral rites, and soon after midday Lieut. Basil Downie, the officer in command of the submarine depot, put to sea in E. 1, followed by E. 9, E. 8, and E. 19. Each boat carried her death potion in the form of torpedo warheads with a 20-lb. dry cotton charge as primers. Three of these charges were allotted to each—one forward, one aft, and one amidships; and when the alarm-bell of the clock in each should ring, contact would be made and the end would come. The point decided on was reached at last. The bells rang, and E. 19, E. 1, and E. 9 sank to their own thunder. E. 8, by some failure of her clock, remained unhurt, and since the ice-breaker could not stay out at sea longer, she was left to die another day, with other comrades. At 7.0 next morning, Lieut. Downie put to sea again with C. 26 and C. 35 and the torpedo-barge, with the few remaining stores. When the clocks rang this time, E. 8 sank, and C. 26 with her. The barge and C. 35 were left to wait for C. 27, the last of that victorious company. On the following morning the barge was blown up, and the two submarines were simply sunk in fifteen fathoms. They went down uninjured, but within three minutes two great explosions followed, and twelve-foot columns of water shot up. ‘This, presumably,’ says the report, ‘was the exploding of their batteries.’ Our Viking ancestors would have said, perhaps, that it was the bursting of their dragon hearts.

CHAPTER IX
BRITISH SUBMARINES IN THE DARDANELLES

Our submarine campaign in the Sea of Marmora must also have a separate chapter to itself, not only because it is now a closed episode in the history of the War, but because it was conducted under quite unique conditions. The scene of operations was not merely distant from the submarine base, it was divided from it by an approach of unusual danger and difficulty. The channel of the Dardanelles is narrow and winding, with a strong tide perpetually racing down it, and setting strongly into the several bays. It was moreover protected, as will appear in the course of the narrative, by forts with powerful guns and searchlights and torpedo tubes, and by barrages of thick wire and netting it was also patrolled constantly by armed ships. Yet from the very first all these defences were evaded or broken through with marvellous courage and ingenuity; for nearly a year a succession of brilliant commanders took their boats regularly up and down the passage, and made the transport of Turkish troops and munitions across the Marmora first hazardous, and finally impracticable. Their losses were small; but they passed the weeks of their incredibly long patrols in continual danger, and snatched their successes from the midst of a swarm of vigilant enemies. Two battle-ships, a destroyer, and five gunboats fell to them, besides over thirty steamers, many of which were armed, nine transports, seven ammunition and store ships, and no less than 188 sailing-ships and dhows with supplies. The pages which follow contain notes on the cruise of every British boat which attempted the passage of the Straits; but they are far from giving an account of all their amazing feats and adventures.

Lieutenant Norman Holbrook had the honour of being the first officer to take a British submarine up the Dardanelles. He carefully prepared his boat—B. 11—for the business of jumping over and under obstacles, by devices which have since been perfected but were then experimental. The preliminary trials turned out very satisfactorily, and on Sunday, December 13, 1914, as soon as the mainland searchlights were extinguished at dawn, he trimmed and dived for Seddul Bahr.

His main idea was to put certain Rickmers steamers out of action, and perhaps the actual object of his pursuit was the Lily Rickmers. He did not get her, but he got something quite as attractive. It was 9.40 A.M., or rather more than four hours from the start, when at last he put his periscope above water, and saw immediately on his starboard beam a large two-funnelled vessel, painted grey and flying the Turkish ensign. At 600 yards he fired his starboard torpedo, put his helm hard a-starboard, and dipped to avoid remonstrances. The explosion was duly audible a few seconds later, and as B. 11 came quietly up of her own motion her commander took a glimpse through the periscope. The grey ship (she was the battle-ship Messudiyeh) was still on his starboard beam, and firing a number of guns. B. 11 seemed bent on dipping again, but Lieutenant Holbrook was still more bent on seeing what he had done. He got her up once more and sighted his enemy, on the port bow this time. She was settling down by the stern and her guns were no longer firing.

At this moment the man at the helm of B. 11 reported that the lenses of the compass had become fogged, and the instrument was for the time unreadable. Lieutenant Holbrook took a careful survey of his surroundings, calculated that he was in Sari Siglar Bay, and dived for the channel. The boat touched bottom and for ten minutes went hop, skip and jump along it, at full speed, until she shot off into deeper water. Her commander then brought her up again, took a sight of the European shore, steadied her by it, and ran for home. By 2 P.M. he had cleared the entrance. His feat was not only brilliant in itself; it was an act of leadership, an invaluable reconnaissance. In ten hours he had proved all the possibilities of the situation—he had forced a strongly guarded channel, surprised and sunk a battle-ship in broad daylight, and returned safely, though he had gone up without information and come down without a compass. The V.C. was his manifest destiny.

In the following spring, after the guns of the Allied fleets had failed to reduce the Turkish forts, the submarine campaign was developed. It began with a defeat—one of those defeats which turn to honour, and maintain the invincibility of our Service. On April 17, while attempting a difficult reconnaissance of the Kephez minefield, E. 15 ran ashore in the Dardanelles within a few hundred yards of Fort No. 8. Her crew were captured while trying to get her off, and there was a danger of her falling into the enemy’s hands in a serviceable condition. The only remedy was to blow her up. She was no sort of a mark for the battle-ships at long range; so during the night of the 18th an attack was made by two picket boats, manned by volunteer crews. The boat of H.M.S. Triumph was commanded by Lieut.-Commander Eric Robinson, who led the expedition, with Lieut. Arthur Brooke Webb, R.N.R., and Midshipman John Woolley, and that of H.M.S. Majestic by Lieut. Claud Godwin. The fort gave them over two hundred rounds at short range, mortally wounded one man and sank the Majestic’s boat; but Lieut.-Commander Robinson succeeded in torpedoing E. 15 and rendering her useless. He brought both crews off, and left even the Germans in Constantinople admiring the pluck of his little enterprise. One officer is reported by Mr. Lewis Einstein, of the American Embassy there,[1] to have said, ‘I take off my hat to the British Navy.’ He was right—this midnight attack by a handful of boys in boats has all the heroic romance of the old cutting-out expeditions, and on Admiral de Robeck’s report the leader of it was promoted to commander.

[1] Inside Constantinople, p. 3. This interesting book throws much light on our submarine campaign, and gives valuable confirmation of our records.

‘The Fort gave them 200 rounds at short range.’

On April 25, A.E. 2 went successfully up and entered the Sea of Marmora; on the 29th, Lieut.-Commander Edward Courtney Boyle followed in E. 14. He started at 1.40 A.M., and the searchlight at Suan Dere was still working when he arrived there at 4 o’clock. The fort fired, and he dived, passing clean under the minefield. He then passed Chanak on the surface with all the forts firing at him. Further on there were a lot of small ships patrolling, and a torpedo gunboat at which he promptly took a shot. The torpedo got her on the quarter and threw up a column of water as high as her mast. But Lieut.-Commander Boyle could not stop to see more—he became aware that the men in a small steamboat were leaning over and trying to catch hold of the top of his periscope. He dipped and left them; then rounded Nagara Point and dived deep. Again and again he came up and was driven down; destroyers and gunboats were chasing and firing in all directions. It was all he could do to charge his batteries at night. After running continuously for over fifty hours, the motors were so hot that he was obliged to stop. The steadiness of all on board may be judged from the record of the diving necessary to avoid destruction. Out of the first sixty-four hours of the voyage, the boat was kept under for forty-four hours and fifty minutes.

On the afternoon of the 29th, he sighted three destroyers convoying two troopships; fired and dipped—for the destroyers were blazing at his periscope, and he had only that one left—the other had stopped a shot the day before. But even down below a thud was audible, and the depth gauges flicked ten feet; half an hour afterwards he saw through the periscope his own particular transport making for the shore with dense columns of yellow smoke pouring from her. And that was her last appearance. A few hours later he sighted A.E. 2 and spoke her. She had sunk one gunboat, but had had bad luck with her other torpedoes and had only one left. Lieut.-Commander Boyle arranged to meet her again next day; but next day the gallant A.E. 2 fell to a Turkish gunboat.

During these days the Sea of Marmora was glassy calm, and the patrol ships were so troublesome that Lieut.-Commander Boyle decided to sink one as a deterrent. He picked off a small mine-laying boat, and fired at a larger one twice without success, as the wake of the torpedoes was too easily seen in the clear water.

The first four days of May he spent mainly in being hunted. On the 5th, he got a shot at a destroyer convoying a transport, and made a fine right-angle hit at 600 yards, but the torpedo failed to explode. This only whetted his appetite, and for three days he chased ship after ship. One he followed inshore, but troops on board opened fire on him and hit the boat several times. At last, on the evening of May 10, after being driven down by one destroyer, he sighted another with two transports, and attacked at once. His first torpedo missed the leading transport; his second shot hit the second transport and a terrific explosion followed. Debris and men were seen falling into the water; then night came on rapidly, and he could not mark the exact moment at which she sank.

Inside Constantinople they were already telling each other yarns about E. 14, and for her incredible activity they even promoted her to the plural number. ‘One of the English submarines in the Marmora,’ Mr. Einstein wrote on May 11, ‘is said to have called at Rodosto, flying the Turkish flag. The Kaimakam, believing the officers to be German, gave them all the petrol and provisions they required, and it was only after leaving that they hoisted their true colours.’ The story will not bear examination from our side; but no doubt it very usefully covered a deficiency in the Kaimakam’s store account, whether caused by Germans or by the Faithful themselves.

On May 13, Lieut.-Commander Boyle records a rifle duel with a small steamer which he had chased ashore near Panidos. On the 14th he remarks the enemy’s growing shyness. ‘I think the Turkish torpedo-boats must have been frightened of ramming us, as several times, when I tried to remain on the surface at night, they were so close when sighted that it must have been possible to get us if they had so desired.’ The air was so clear that in the daytime he was almost always in sight from the shore, and signal fires and smoke columns passed the alarm continually. He had no torpedoes left and was not mounted with a gun, so that he was now at the end of his tether. On the 17th he was recalled by wireless, and after diving all night ran for Gallipoli at full speed, pursued by a two-funnelled gunboat, a torpedo-boat and a tug, who shepherded him one on each side and one astern, ‘evidently expecting,’ he thought, ‘to get me caught in the nets.’ But he adds,’did not notice any nets,’ and after passing another two-funnelled gunboat, a large yacht, a battle-ship and a number of tramps, the fire of the Chanak forts and the minefield as before, he reached the entrance and rose to the surface abeam of a French battle-ship of the St. Louis class, who gave her fellow crusader a rousing cheer. Commander Boyle reported that the success of this fine and sustained effort was mainly due to his officers, Lieutenant Edward Stanley and Acting-Lieutenant Lawrence, R.N.R., both of whom received the D.S.C. His own promotion to Commander was underlined by the award of the V.C.

Within twelve hours of E. 14’s return, her successor, E. 11, was proceeding towards the Straits. The commanding officer of this boat was Lieut.-Commander M. E. Nasmith, who had already been mentioned in despatches for rescuing five airmen while being attacked by a Zeppelin in the Heligoland Bight during the action on Christmas Day, 1914. He had been waiting his turn at the Dardanelles with some impatience, and as E. 11’s port engine had been put completely out of action by an accident on the voyage from Malta, he had begged to be allowed to attempt the passage into the Marmora under one engine. This was refused, but his repairs were finished in time for him to take the place of E. 14.

He made the passage of the Straits successfully, reconnoitred the Marmora and made a neat arrangement, probably suggested by the adventures of E. 14, for saving the enemy the trouble of so much hunting. He stopped a small coastal sailing vessel, sent Lieut. D’Oyly Hughes to search her for contraband, and then trimmed well down and made her fast alongside his conning-tower. Being now quite invisible from the eastward, he was able to proceed in that direction all day without interruption. At night he released his stalking-horse and returned westward.

‘Made her fast alongside his conning-tower.’

Early on the 23rd, he observed a Turkish torpedo-boat at anchor off Constantinople and sank her with a torpedo; but as she sank she fired a 6-pounder gun, the first shot of which damaged his foremost periscope. He came up for repairs, and all hands took the chance of a bathe. Five hours later he stopped a small steamer, whose crew did a ‘panic abandon ship,’ capsizing all boats but one. ‘An American gentleman then appeared on the upper deck, who informed us that his name was Silas Q. Swing of the Chicago Sun and that he was pleased to make our acquaintance.... He wasn’t sure if there were any stores on board.’ Lieut. D’Oyly Hughes looked into the matter and discovered a 6-inch gun lashed across the top of the fore hatch, and other gun-mountings in the hold, which was also crammed with 6-inch and other ammunition marked Krupp. A demolition charge sent ship and cargo to the bottom.

Lieut.-Commander Nasmith then chased and torpedoed a heavily laden store-ship, and drove another ashore, exchanging rifle fire with a party of horsemen on the cliff above. Altogether the day was a lively one, and the news, brought by Mr. Silas Q. Swing and his friends, shook Constantinople up severely. Mr. Einstein records that ‘the submarine came up at 20 minutes to 2 o’clock, about three hundred yards from where the American guardship Scorpion lay moored, and was immediately fired at by the shore batteries. It shot off two torpedoes; the first missed a transport by about fifty yards, the second struck the Stamboul fair, passing under a barge moored alongside, which blew up. The Stamboul had a gap of twenty feet on her water-line but did not sink. She was promptly towed toward Beshiktash to lie on the bottom in shallow water. The submarine meanwhile, under a perfect hail of fire, which passed uncomfortably close to the Scorpion, dived and got away, steering up the Bosphorus. At Galata there was a panic, everyone closing their shops; the troops, who were already on two transports, were promptly disembarked, but later re-embarked, and still later landed once more. The total damage was inconsiderable, but the moral effect was very real.’ On the following day he adds, ‘S.’ (Swing, no doubt—Silas Q. Swing of the Chicago Sun) ‘came in with an exciting tale. On his way to the Dardanelles the steamer, which carried munitions and a 6-inch gun, had been torpedoed by an English submarine, the E. 11. They allowed the crew to leave, and then sank the ship. The English officer told him there were eleven submarines in the Marmora, and these are holding up all the ships going to the Dardanelles. They had sunk three transports full of troops, out of four which had been sunk, and various other vessels, but do not touch those carrying wounded.’

So, between Lieut. D’Oyly Hughes and Mr. Silas Q. Swing, the E. 11 became eleven submarines, and may go down the ages like the eleven thousand virgins of Cologne. Her commander evidently hoped to create a panic, and Mr. Einstein leaves us no doubt that the plan succeeded to the full. On May 27 he writes again: ‘The Marmora is practically closed by English submarines. Everyone asks where their depot is, and how they are refurnished.’ May 28: ‘The submarines in the Marmora have frightened the Turks, and all the remaining transports, save one, lie tranquilly in the Golden Horn. Otherwise I have never seen the port so empty. One wonders where the submarines have their base, and when and how it was prepared.’ He adds, with some shrewdness: ‘Probably, if at all, in some island of the Marmora, though the newer boats can stay out a long time.’ E. 11 was far from new, as we have seen, but she was in hands that could make her stand for quality as well as quantity.

Lieut.-Commander Nasmith brought his boat safely back to Mudros on June 7. The last hour of his trip was perhaps the most breathless, for while rushing down by Kilid Bahr he found his trim quite abnormal, and ‘observed a large mine preceding the periscope at a distance of about twenty feet; which was apparently hung up by its moorings to the port hydroplane.’ He could not come to the surface, as the shore batteries were waiting for him; but when outside Kum Kale, he emptied his after-tanks, got his nose down, and went full speed astern, dropping the mine neatly to the bottom. This was good work, but not better than the skill shown in navigating shoal water, or ‘the resource displayed in the delicate operation of recovering two torpedoes’ without the usual derrick to hoist them in—an operation which may as well remain for the present undescribed. Admiral de Robeck, in recommending Lieut.-Commander Nasmith for the V.C., speaks of his cruise as one ‘which will surely find a place in the annals of the British Navy.’ It will—there can be no forgetting it. The very log of E. 11 deserves to be a classic. ‘Having dived unobserved into Constantinople ...,’ says her Commander soberly, and so, without a thought of it, adds one to the historic despatches of the Service.

It was now E. 14’s turn again. Commander Courtney Boyle took her up on June 10, against a very strong tide. At 9 o’clock next morning he stopped a brigantine, whose crew abandoned ship ‘and then all stood up and cursed us. It was too rough to go alongside her, so Acting-Lieut. R. W. Lawrence, R.N.R., swam off to her, climbed aboard, and ... set fire to her with the aid of her own matches and paraffin oil.’ On the 12th one of the Rickmers steamers was torpedoed. Shortly afterwards there was a big explosion close to the submarine. ‘And I think,’ says her commander, ‘I must have caught the moorings of a mine with my tail as I was turning, and exploded it.... The whole boat was very badly shaken.’ But Lily Rickmers and her sister were now both removed from the Turkish service, for E. 11 had evidently accounted for one of them already. Mr. Einstein writes on June 13: ‘The German Embassy approached us to cable Washington to protest about the torpedoing without warning of the two Rickmers steamers in the Marmora. One of these was said to be filled with wounded, but their note neglected to say that these had been discharged from hospital and were on their way back to the Dardanelles.’ Only a German diplomatist could speak of a ship carrying troops to the front as ‘filled with wounded’; and Mr. Einstein adds, ‘One cannot but be struck by the German inability to understand our position over the Lusitania.’ The point is plain, and goes deep. To the modern German mind all such considerations are only a matter of words, useful for argumentative purposes—that there should be any truth of reality or feeling behind them is not imaginable.

The rest of this log is a record of destruction, but destruction on thoroughly un-German methods. ‘June 20.—Boarded and sank 3 sailing dhows ... towed the crew inshore and gave them some biscuit, beef, rum, and water, as they were rather wet.’ ‘June 22.—Let go passenger ship.’ 23.—‘Burnt two-master, and started to tow crew in their boat, but had to dive. Stopped two dhows: they were both empty and the crews looked so miserable that I only sunk one and let the other go.’ 24.—‘Blew up 2 large dhows: there was another one about a mile off with no boat ... and thought I saw two heads in the water. Turned round and found that there were 2 men in the water at least half a mile from their dhow. Picked them up: they were quite exhausted: gave them food and drink, and put them on board their ship. They had evidently seen the other two dhows blown up and were frightened out of their wits.’ There is nothing here to boast about—to us, nothing surprising. But it brings to mind inevitably the evidence upon which our enemies stand convicted. We remember the long roll of men and women not only set adrift in stormy seas, but shot and drowned in their open boats without pity and without cause. We admit the courage of the Hun, but we cannot admire it. It is too near to animal ferocity, and stained with a cruelty and callousness which are not even beast-like.

On June 21, Commander Boyle had rendezvoused with E. 12, Lieut.-Commander K. M. Bruce. ‘I got her alongside, and we remained tied up for 3 hours.’ From this time onward the reliefs were arranged to overlap, so that there were nearly always two boats operating at the same time in the Marmora. Lieut.-Commander Bruce came up on June 19, and found, like others, that the chief difficulty of forcing the passage was the heating of the main motors on so long and strenuous a run.

The one great day of his nine days’ patrol was June 25, when he brought off a hand-to-hand fight on the surface with three enemy ships. At 10.45 in the morning he sighted, in the Gulf of Mudania, a small two-decked passenger steamer. ‘She looked,’ he says, ‘rather like a tram-car, and was towing two sailing-vessels. In the distance was a sister of hers, towing three more.’ He chased, and soon stopped the nearer steamer. He could see, as he steamed round her, that she was carrying a lot of stores. She had no boat, and all the crew appeared to be on deck in lifebelts. He could see no sign of guns, so he ran his bow up alongside and sent his first-lieutenant, Tristram Fox, to board her. But guns are not the only risk a submarine has to take on such occasions. As the boarding party stepped on board the steamer, a Turk heaved a bomb over the side. It hit E. 12 forward, but did not explode, and no second one followed. The Turks, however, meant fighting, and they opened fire with rifles and a small gun, concealed somewhere aft. The situation was a very anxious one, especially for Lieutenant Fox and his boarding party; for they knew their own ship must open fire in return, and it was difficult to take cover on an enemy ship in action. Lieut.-Commander Bruce was in a very tight corner, but he kept his head and played his game without a mistake. He did not hesitate to open fire with his 6-pounder, but he began upon the enemy’s stern, where the gun was concealed, and having dealt with that he turned to her other end and put ten shots into her from fore to aft. His men shot steadily, though under gun and rifle fire at a range of only ten yards, and his coxswain, Charles Case, who was with him in the conning-tower, passed up the ammunition. Spare men, with rifles, kept the Turks’ heads down, and all seemed to be going well, when the two sailing-ships in tow began a new and very plucky move of their own. They came in to foul the submarine’s propellers, and at the same time opened fire with rifles, taking E. 12 in flank. But by this time the steamer was beaten, and the British rifles soon silenced those in the sailing-ships. Then, as soon as Lieut.-Commander Bruce had cleared the steamer, he sank the three of them. The steamer had probably been carrying ammunition as well as stores, for one of the shots from the 6-pounder touched off something explosive in her forward part. In fifteen minutes she was at the bottom.

Lieut.-Commander Bruce was already thinking of the other steamer with the three sailing-ships in tow. She was diligently making for the shore, and he had to open fire at her at 2000 yards. As he closed, the fire was returned, not only from the ship but from a gun on shore; but by this time he had hit the enemy aft, and set her on fire forward. She beached herself, and as the three sailing-ships had been slipped and were also close under the shore, he had no choice but to leave them. E. 12’s injuries were miraculously slight—her commander’s account of them is slighter still. ‘I was very much hampered,’ he says, ‘in my movements and took some minutes to get clear of the first steamer. But only one man was hurt, by a splinter from the steamer.’ This was quite in accordance with the old English rule of the gun-decks: to hit and be missed there’s nothing like closing. The story of this fine little scrimmage ends with the special recommendation by Lieut.-Commander Bruce of his first-lieutenant, Tristram Fox, ‘who behaved exceedingly well under very trying circumstances,’ and of his coxswain, Charles Case, and three seamen—they all received the Distinguished Service Medal. Of the commander himself we shall hear again presently.

E. 12 was recalled on June 28, leaving E. 14 still at work; and on the 30th her place was taken by E. 7, Lieut.-Commander Cochrane. On the way up, a torpedo from a tube on shore passed over him, and a destroyer made two attempts to ram him, but he got safely through and rendezvoused with E. 14 on the following evening. His misfortunes began next day, when Lieut. Hallifax and an A.B. were badly burned by an explosion in the hold of a captured steamer. Then dysentery attacked the two remaining officers and the telegraphist. Work became very arduous, but work was done notwithstanding. Ship after ship was sunk—five steamers and sixteen sailing-ships in all. One of the steamers was ‘a Mahsousie ship, the Biga,’ of about 3,000 tons. She was lying alongside Mudania Pier, with sailing-vessels moored outside the pier to protect her. But Lieut.-Commander Cochrane saw daylight between this barrage and his prey; he dived under the sailing-ships, and up went the Biga with a very heavy explosion.

On July 17, he tried a new method of harassing the Turkish army. He came up opposite Kara Burnu and opened fire on the railway cutting west of it, blocking the line—then dived, and went on to Derinjie Burnu. The shipyard there was closed, but he observed a heavy troop train steaming west, towards the block he had so carefully established just before. He followed up at full speed, and after twenty minutes of anxious hope saw the train returning baffled. It eventually stopped in a belt of trees at Yarandji Station; this made spotting difficult, but E. 7’s gunnery was good enough. After twenty rounds the three ammunition cars of the train were definitely blown up, and E. 7 could move back to Kara Burnu, where she shelled another train and hit it several times.

All this was very disturbing to the Turks, and they tried every means to stop it at the source. They had already a net in the channel, but it was quite ineffectual. ‘Now,’ says Mr. Einstein on July 15, ‘it turns out that they have constructed a barrage of network to keep out the submarines from the Dardanelles, and this explains the removal of the buoys all along the Bosphorus. They need these, and especially their chains, to keep it in place.’ A week later, Lieut.-Commander Cochrane saw these buoys on his way down. They were in a long line, painted alternately red and black, and stretching from a position a mile north of Maitos village to a steamer moored in Nagara Liman. He dived under them and went on his way; but later on, below Kilid Bahr, the boat fouled a moorings forward and was completely hung up, swinging round, head to tide. By admirable management she was got clear in half an hour, and then the same thing happened again. ‘This time,’ says her commander coolly, ‘I think the boat carried the obstruction with her for some distance. I was expecting to see something foul when we came to the surface, but everything was clear then.’ What he and his men saw, during those two half-hours, might also be described as ‘something foul.’

The cruise of E. 7 lasted for over three weeks, from June 30 to July 24. On July 21, Commander Courtney Boyle brought up E. 14 once more. He, too, saw the new net near Nagara, ‘a line of what looked like lighters half-way across, and one small steamship in the vicinity.’ But he passed through the gate in it without touching anything. This was lucky, as he had already scraped against an obstruction off Kilid Bahr and cut his guard wire nearly through. Once up, he got to work at once, and in a busy and adventurous three weeks he sank one steamer, one supply ship, seven dhows and thirteen sailing-vessels. In short, he made himself master of the Marmora. The complete interruption of the Turkish sea communications was proved by the statements of prisoners. The captain of one ship stated that Constantinople was full of wounded and short of food, and that the troops now all went to Rodosto by rail and then marched to Gallipoli—six hours in the train and three days and nights marching, instead of a short and simple voyage. All the Turkish war-ships were above the second bridge in the Golden Horn, and they never ventured out. There were no steamers going to sea—all supplies to Gallipoli went in sailing craft, towed by destroyers under cover of darkness. It is clear that, to the Turkish imagination, E. 14 was like E. 11—very much in the plural number. On August 5, E. 11 herself came on duty again, and the two boats met at rendezvous at 2 P.M. next day. Half an hour afterwards, Commanders Boyle and Nasmith started on their first hunt in couples. Their quarry was a gunboat of the Berki-Satvet class. The chase was a lively one, and it was E. 11, in the end, who made the kill with a torpedo amidships. Then the two boats came alongside again and their commanders concerted a plan for shelling troops next day.

They took up their positions in the early morning hours, and waited for the game to come past. Commander Nasmith had been given the better stand of the two; at 11.30 A.M. he observed troops going towards Gallipoli, rose to the surface and fired. Several of his shots dropped well among them and they scattered. In less than an hour another column approached along the same road. E. 11 had retired, so to speak, into her butt; she now stepped up again, raised her gun, and made good shooting as before. ‘The column took cover in open order.’

In the meantime Commander Boyle had been diving up and down all the morning between Fort Victoria and a point four miles up the coast to the east, about a mile from shore. Three times he came to the surface, but each time the troops turned out to be bullocks. At 1.30 P.M. (when he came up for the fourth time) more dust was coming down the road, and this time it was the right kind of dust. As he opened fire he heard E. 11 banging away. She had left the place where he had stationed her, to the N.E. of Dohan Aslan Bank, and had come down to join him in his billet. The two boats then conducted a joint action for the best part of an hour. Commander Boyle got off forty rounds, of which about six burst on the road among the troops, and one in a large building. But the distance was almost beyond his 6-pounder’s reach. He had to put the full range on the sights, and then aim at the top of the hill, so that his fire was less accurate than that of Commander Nasmith with his 12-pounder. E. 11 had strewed the road with a large number of dead and wounded, when guns on shore came into action and forced her to dive. She came up again an hour and a half later and dispersed the troops afresh, but once more had to dive for her life.

Next day, Commander Boyle ordered E. 11 to change billets with him, and both boats had luck, Commander Boyle destroying a 5,000-ton supply steamer with torpedo and gunfire, and Commander Nasmith bagging a battle-ship. This last was the Haireddin Barbarossa. She was passing about five miles N.E. of Gallipoli, escorted by a destroyer. E. 11 was skilfully brought into position on her starboard beam, and the torpedo got home amidships. The Barbarossa immediately took a list to starboard, altered course towards the shore, and opened a heavy fire on the submarine’s periscope. But she was mortally hit. Within twenty minutes a large flash burst from her fore part, and she rolled over and sank. To lose their last battleship, and so near home, was a severe blow for the Turks, and they made every effort to conceal the depressing details. Mr. Einstein, however, heard them and makes an interesting entry. ‘The Barbarossa was sunk in the Marmora and not in the Dardanelles, as officially announced. She was convoying barges full of munitions and also two transports, when she found herself surrounded by six submarines.’ It is creditable to Commander Nasmith that he did so well with only six of his E. 11 flotilla. Einstein continues: ‘The transports were supposed to protect her, but the second torpedo proved effective and she sank in seven minutes. One of the transports and a gunboat were also sunk, the other ran aground. Of crews of 700, only one-third were saved.’ And on August 15 he records further successes by Commander Nasmith—a large collier, the Ispahan, sunk while unloading in the port of Haidar Pasha, the submarine creeping up under the lee of another boat; and two transports with supplies, the Chios and the Samsoun, sunk in the Marmora.

‘She was mortally hit.’

Commander Boyle returned to his base on August 12, with no further difficulty than a brush against a mine and a rough-and-tumble encounter with an electric wire obstruction, portions of which he carried away tangled round his periscope and propellers. His boat had now done over 12,000 miles since leaving England and had never been out of running order—a magnificent performance, reported by her commander to be primarily due to the excellence of his chief engine-room artificer, James Hollier Hague, who was accordingly promoted to warrant rank, as from the date of the recommendation.

E. 14 was succeeded on August 13 by E. 2, Commander David Stocks, who met Commander Nasmith at 2 P.M. next day, and handed over a fresh supply of ammunition for E. 11. He also, no doubt, told him the story of his voyage up. Off Nagara his boat had fouled an obstruction, and through the conning-tower scuttles he could see that a 3½-inch wire was wound with a half turn round his gun, a smaller wire round the conning-tower itself, and another round the wireless standard aft. It took him ten minutes’ plunging and backing to clear this and regain control; and during those ten minutes, small explosions were heard continuously. These were apparently from bombs thrown by guard boats; but a series of loud explosions, a little later, were probably from shells fired by a destroyer which was following up, and was still overhead an hour afterwards.

The two boats parted again, taking separate beats, and spent a week in sinking steamers, boarding hospital ships, and bombarding railway stations. When they met again on the evening of August 21, Commander Nasmith had a new kind of yarn to tell. His lieutenant, D’Oyly Hughes, had volunteered to make an attack on the Ismid Railway, and a whole day had been spent behind Kalolimno Island in constructing a raft capable of carrying one man and a demolition charge of gun-cotton. Then the raft had been tested by a bathing party, and the details of the plan most carefully laid out.

The object was to destroy the viaduct if possible; but, in any case, to blow up part of the line. The risk involved not only the devoted adventurer himself, but the boat as well, for she could not, so long as he had still a chance of returning, quit the neighbourhood or even conceal herself by submerging. The approach was in itself an operation of the greatest delicacy. Commander Nasmith took his boat slowly towards the shore until her nose just grounded, only three yards from the rocks. The cliffs on each side were high enough to prevent the conning-tower being seen while in this position. At 2.10 A.M. Lieut. D’Oyly Hughes dropped into the water and swam off, pushing the raft with his bale of gun-cotton, and his clothes and accoutrements, towards a spot some sixty yards on the port bow of the boat. His weapons were an automatic service revolver and a sharpened bayonet. He also had an electric torch and a whistle. At the point where he landed he found the cliffs unscalable. So he relaunched his raft and swam along to a better place. He reached the top after a stiff climb, approached the railway line by a careful prowl of half an hour, and went along it for five or six hundred yards, hugging his heavy and cumbersome charge. Voices then brought him up short. He peered about and saw three men sitting by the side of the line. After watching them for some time he decided that they were not likely to move, and that he must make a wide detour in order to inspect the viaduct. He laid down his gun-cotton, and crept inland, making good progress except for falling into a small farmyard, where the fowls, but luckily not the household, awoke and protested. At last he got within three hundred yards of the viaduct. It was easy to see, for there was a fire burning at the near end of it; but there was also a stationary engine working, and a number of workmen moving about. Evidently it would be impossible to bring up and lay his charge there.

He crept back therefore to his gun-cotton and looked about for a convenient spot to blow up the line. The best place seemed to be a low brick-work support over a small hollow. It was only 150 yards from the three men sitting by the line; but there was no other spot where so much damage could be done, and Lieut. D’Oyly Hughes was a volunteer, prepared to take risks. He muffled the pistol for firing the fuse as tightly as possible, with a piece of rag, and pulled off. On so still a night it made a very loud noise. The three Turks heard it and he saw them instantly stand up. The next moment they were running down the line, with Lieutenant D’Oyly Hughes going his best in front of them. But a chase of this kind was not what he wanted. His present object was to find a quiet spot on the shore where he could take to the water undisturbed, and he had no time to lose. He turned on his pursuers and fired a couple of shots; the Turks were not hit, but they remembered their own weapons and began firing too, which was just the relief Lieut. Hughes needed.

He had already decided against trying to climb down by the way he had come up; but after a considerable run eastward, he struck the shore more conveniently about three-quarters of a mile from the small bay in which E. 11 was lying. As he plunged into the water, he had the joy of hearing the sound of a heavy explosion. His charge had hung fire for a long time, but when it went it went well; fragments were hurled between a quarter and half a mile, and fell into the sea near the boat. There could be no doubt that the line was effectively cut; and he could now give his whole attention to saving an officer to the Service.

This was the most desperate part of the affair. After swimming some four hundred or five hundred yards out to sea, he blew a long blast on his whistle; but the boat was behind the cliffs in her little bay and failed to hear him. Day was breaking rapidly; the time of waiting for him must, he knew, be limited. With a decision and coolness beyond comment he swam ashore again and rested for a short time on the rocks—then swam off once more, directly towards the boat. Before he reached the bay, he had to discard in turn his pistol, his bayonet, and his electric torch. At last he rounded the point and his whistle was heard; but, at the same moment, shouts came from the cliffs overhead, and rifle fire opened on the boat.

She immediately backed, and came slowly astern out of the bay, intent only upon picking up Lieut. D’Oyly Hughes. But now came the most extraordinary part of the whole adventure. In the early morning mist the bow, the gun, and the conning-tower of the submarine appeared to her distressed officer to be three small rowing-boats advancing towards him, and rowing-boats could only mean enemies. He turned, swam ashore, and tried to hide himself under the cliffs. But he did not lose his head, and after climbing a few feet he looked back and realised his mistake. He shouted and plunged in again. Forty yards from the rocks he was at last picked up, nearly done, for he had run hard for his life and swum a mile in his clothes. But he had done his work and E. 11 was proud of him, as appears from the concluding sentence in her log: ‘5.5 A.M. Dived out of rifle fire, and proceeded out of the Gulf of Ismid.’

Commander Nasmith ended his cruise with a brilliant week’s work. On August 22 he fought an action with three armed tugs, a dhow, and a destroyer; succeeded most adroitly in evading the destroyer, sinking the dhow and one of the tugs by gunfire, and capturing a number of prisoners, among whom was a German bank manager with a quantity of money for Chanak Bank. The prisoners willingly helped to discharge the cargo of another captured ship—they were apparently much surprised at being granted their lives. On the 25th, two large transports were sunk with torpedoes; on the 28th, E. 11 and E. 2, in company, bombarded the magazine and railway station at Mudania. On September 1, Commander Nasmith had an hour’s deliberate shooting at the railway viaduct, scoring a large number of hits; and on the 3rd he returned without misadventure to his base.

Left to herself, E. 2 now found that she also possessed a heroic lieutenant. Under the date September 7 there stands the brief record: ‘Lieutenant Lyon swam to and destroyed two dhows.’ The story, so well begun, ends next day. At 2.15 A.M. this adventurer, like the other, swam off with a raft and bag of gun-cotton. His object, like the other’s, was to destroy a railway bridge. His friends watched him until, at seventy yards’ distance, he faded into the dusk. From that moment onwards no sound was ever heard from him. The night was absolutely still, and noises on shore were distinctly audible; but nothing like a signal ever came. It had been agreed that if any trouble arose he should fire his Webley pistol, and the submarine should then show a red light and open fire on the station, which was 300 yards distant. For five hours she remained there waiting. An explosion was heard, but nothing followed, and broad daylight found Commander Stocks still waiting with desperate loyalty. At 7.15 he dived out to sea. An hour later he came to the surface and cruised about the place, hoping that Lyon had managed somehow to get into a boat or dhow. There were several near the village, and he might be lying off in one. But no boat drifted out, then or afterwards. Commander Stocks came again at dawn next day—perhaps, as he said, to bombard the railway station, perhaps for another reason. Six days later he dived for home, breaking right through the Nagara net, by a new and daring method of his own.

It was now Lieut.-Commander Bruce’s turn again, and he passed all records by patrolling the Marmora successfully in E. 12 for forty days. He had two other boats in company during part of this time—E. 20 and H. 1—and with the latter’s help he carried out a very pretty ‘spread attack’ on a gunboat off Kalolimno, on October 17. The intended manœuvre was for E. 12 to rise suddenly and drive the enemy by gunfire over H. 1, who dived at the first gun. The first drive failed, the second was beautifully managed; but, in the bad light of an approaching squall, H. 1’s torpedo missed. In a third attempt the bird was reported hit by several shells, but she escaped in the darkness. Lieut.-Commander Bruce also did good shooting at a powder factory near Constantinople; sank some shipping, and made some remarkable experiments with a new method of signalling. But his greatest experience was his return journey.

He had passed through the net, he thought, but suddenly observed that he was towing a portion of it with him. The boat began to sink quickly, bows down; the foremost hydroplane jammed. He immediately forced her nose up, by blowing ballast tanks and driving her at full speed. But, even in that position, she continued to sink till she reached 245 feet. At that depth the pressure was tremendous. The conning-tower scuttles burst in, and the conning-tower filled with water. The boat leaked badly, and the fore compartment had to be closed off to prevent the water getting into the battery, where it would have produced the fatal fumes of chlorine gas.

For ten mortal minutes the commander wrestled with his boat. At last, by putting three men on to the hydroplane with hand-gear, he forced the planes to work and the boat rose. He just managed to check her at twelve feet and got her down to fifty, but even at that depth six patrol vessels could be heard firing at her—probably she was still towing something which made a wake on the surface.

Blind, and almost unmanageable, E. 12 continued to plunge up and down, making very little way beyond Nagara. The conning-tower and its compass were out of action, but the commander conned his boat from the main gyro compass, and when both diving gauges failed he used the gauge by the periscope. The climax was reached when at eighty feet, just to the south of Kilid Bahr, another obstruction was met and carried away. But this was a stroke of luck, for when the commander, by a real inspiration, put on full speed ahead and worked his helm, the new entanglement slid along the side of the boat and carried away with it the old one from Nagara. The boat rose steeply by the bow and broke surface. Shore batteries and patrols opened fire, and a small shell cracked the conning-tower; others hit the bridge, and two torpedoes narrowly missed her astern. But she came safely through to Helles, and reached her base after a cruise of over 2,000 miles.

H. 1 also put nearly 2,000 miles to her credit, though her cruise lasted only thirty days, as against E. 12’s forty. Lieutenant Wilfred Pirie, her commander, took a hand in Lieut.-Commander Bruce’s signalling experiments and co-operated in several of his military enterprises, as we have already seen. He also worked with E. 20 and was the last to meet her. This was on October 31, the day before he dived for home. After that, nothing more was heard of her till December 5, when Commander Nasmith, who was once more in the Marmora with E. 11, captured a Shirket steamer and obtained much information from the captain, a French-speaking Turk. According to his statement, E. 20 had been ambushed, and her officers and crew taken prisoners. He also gave details of the German submarines based at Constantinople—he thought there were ten of them, including three large ones. Before accepting this, we shall do well to refer again to Mr. Einstein, who reports four small boats coming from Pola, of which only three arrived; and one larger one, U. 51, of which he tells an amusing story. U. 51 had been at Constantinople, but during August she went out and did not return; it was rumoured that she had gone home, or been sunk. Then the Turks were electrified by news of the arrival of a new German super-submarine, over two hundred feet long. All Constantinople crowded to see her go out on August 30. ‘Departure from Golden Horn of a new giant German submarine, the U. 54, over 200 feet long and with complete wireless apparatus.’ Next day: ‘The U. 54 turns out to be our old friend U. 51, with another number painted.’ On September 2 Mr. Einstein adds sarcastically: ‘Report that U. 54 was badly damaged by a Turkish battery at Silivri.... To mask this, they are spreading the rumour that an English submarine ran aground, and will doubtless bring in the German boat under a false number as though she were a captured prey.’ And two days later he was justified—‘U. 54 lies damaged in the Golden Horn from the fire of a Turkish battery. The reported sinking of an English boat is a downright lie.’

Commander Nasmith went down the Straits on December 23, after a record cruise of forty-eight days. In that time he sank no less than forty-six enemy ships, including a destroyer, the Var Hissar, and ten steamers. A fortnight before he left, E. 2, Commander Stocks, came up, and did good work in very bad weather, until she was recalled on January 2, 1916. The season was over, and she found, in passing down the Straits, that the Turkish net had apparently been removed, either by the enemy themselves, or perhaps by the wear and tear of British submarines repeatedly charging it and carrying it away piecemeal.

So ended our Eastern submarine campaign—a campaign in which our boats successfully achieved their military objects—in which, too, the skill of our officers and men was only surpassed by their courage, and by their chivalrous regard for the enemies whom they defeated.

CHAPTER X
THE U-BOAT BLOCKADE

Nothing in the history of the past four years has more clearly brought out the difference between the civilised and the savage view of war, than the record of the German U-boat campaign. All civilised men are agreed, and have for centuries been agreed, about war. In their view war may be unavoidable, in so far as all order and security are ultimately dependent on force; but it is a lamentable necessity, and when unnecessary—that is, when undertaken for any object whatever except defence against aggression or tyranny—it is an abominable thing, a violation of human nature. This view is not inconsistent with the plain truth that the act of fighting is often pleasurable in itself, and that, when fighting in a right spirit, men often reach heights of nobility which they would never attain in peaceful occupations.

The savage is in accord with this view on one point only. He has the primitive joy of battle in him; but he cares nothing for right or wrong, and his military power is exerted either wantonly, or with the object of plunder and domination. So long as he gratifies his selfish instincts, he does not care what happens to the rest of the human race, or to human nature. Civilised men have for centuries laid down rules of war, that human industry and human society might suffer only such damage as could not be avoided in the exercise of armed force; and above all, that human nature might not be corrupted by acts done or suffered in brutal violation of it. These rules of chivalry were not always kept, but by civilised nations they have never been broken without shame and repentance. Savage races sometimes have a rudimentary tradition of the kind—the less savage they. But, in general, they have a brute courage and a brute ferocity, without mercy or law; and the worst of all are those who, living in community with races of merciful and law-abiding ideals, have themselves never been touched by the spirit of chivalry, and have ended by making the repudiation of it into a national religion of their own.

It has long been a recognised characteristic of the British stock, all over the world, to regard a stout opponent with generous admiration, even with a feeling of fellowship; and to deal kindly with him when defeated. But this chivalry of feeling and conduct, now so widespread among us, is a spiritual inheritance and derived, not from our Teutonic ancestors, but from our conquest by French civilisation. It has never been shared by the Germans, or shown in any of their wars. Froissart remarked, five and a half centuries ago, on the difference between the French and English knights, who played their limited game of war with honour and courtesy, and the Germans, who had neither of those qualities. A century later, it is recorded of Bayard—‘Le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche’—that whenever he was serving in an army with a German contingent, he was careful to stay in billets till they had marched out, because of their habit of burning, when they left, the houses where they had found hospitality. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries their barbarity was unbounded; the Thirty Years’ War was the lasting shame of Europe, and the Sack of Magdeburg a final example of the triumph of the wild swine in man. In the eighteenth century, Prussia produced a grotesque anticipation of Zulu ideals, and called its chief Frederick the Great. In the Napoleonic wars, the cruelty of his German allies disgusted the Iron Duke, who had commanded many ruffians and seen some appalling days of horror. In our own time, we have witnessed the brutal attacks on Denmark and Austria, the treachery of the Ems telegram, and the development of Bismarck’s blood-and-iron policy into the complete Machiavellism of Wilhelm II and his confederates. It is not a new character, the German; it is an old one, long inherited. Nemo repente fit Tirpissimas. If anyone doubts this, or wishes to doubt it, let him look through the criminal statistics of the German Government for the ten years preceding the War, and read the book of Professor Aschaffenburg, the chief criminologist of Germany, published in 1913. He will there find it stated and proved, that the most violent and abominable forms of crime were then prevalent in Germany, to a degree beyond all our experience—beyond all imagination of what was possible in a human community—and that the honest and patriotic writer himself regarded this ever-rising tide of savagery, among the younger generation, as ‘a serious menace to the moral stability of Europe.’ It is against this younger generation, with these old vices, that we have had to defend ourselves; and now that we have beaten them, now that the time has come when, if they had been clean fighters and fellow-men, every British hand would have been ready for their grip, we can but hold back with grave and temperate anger, and the recollection that we have first to safeguard the new world from those who have desolated and defiled the old.

Anger it must still be, however grave and temperate. Look at the conduct of the War, and especially at the conduct of the submarine war, as coolly and scientifically as you can, you will not find it possible to separate the purely military from the moral aspect. Technically, the Germans were making trial of a new weapon which it was difficult to use effectively under the old rules. They quickly determined, not to improve or adapt the weapon, but to abandon the rules. For this they were rightly condemned by the only powerful neutral opinion remaining in the world. But they not only broke the law, they broke it in German fashion. Their lawlessness, if skilfully carried out with the natural desire to avoid unnecessary suffering, might have been reduced to an almost technical breach, involving little or no loss of life. But they chose instead to exhibit to the world, present and to come, the spectacle of a whole Service practising murder under deliberate orders; and adding strokes of personal cruelty hitherto known only among madmen or merciless barbarians. Finally—and this concerns our future intercourse even more nearly—the German people at home, a nation haughtily claiming pre-eminence in all virtue, moral and intellectual, accepted every order of their ruling caste, and applauded every act of their hordes in the battle, however abhorrent to sane human feeling. In all this, we need make no accusations of our own; we have only to set out the facts, and the words with which the German people and their teachers received them and rejoiced in them.

It was towards the end of 1914 that the German Admiralty conceived the idea of blockading the British Isles by means of a submarine fleet. There were, as we have already seen, great difficulties in the way. For the pursuit and capture of commerce, a submarine is not nearly so well fitted as an ordinary cruiser; is not, in fact, well fitted at all. To hold up and examine a ship on the surface is too dangerous a venture for a frail boat with a very small crew; to put a prize crew on board, and send the captured vessel into port, is generally impossible. As an exception, and in case of extreme necessity, it has always been recognised that a prize may be sunk, if the crew and passengers are safely provided for; but this proviso, too, is almost impossible for a submarine to fulfil. Besides these technical difficulties, there was also the danger of offending neutral powers, especially if their ships were to be sunk without evidence that they were carrying contraband.

Under the advice of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, it was decided to defy all these risks and difficulties. The question was asked by him, just before Christmas 1914, ‘What would America say, if Germany should declare a submarine war against all enemy trading vessels?’ and on February 4, 1915, a formal proclamation followed from Berlin. This announced that the waters round Great Britain and Ireland were held to be a war-region, and that from February 18 ‘every enemy merchant-vessel found in this region will be destroyed, without its always being possible to warn the crews or passengers of the dangers threatening.’

No civilised Power had ever before threatened to murder non-combatants in this fashion; but there was even worse to come—the seamen of nations not at war at all were to take their chance of death with the rest. ‘Neutral ships will also incur danger in the war-region, where, in view of the misuse of neutral flags ordered by the British Government, and incidents inevitable in sea warfare, attacks intended for hostile ships may affect neutral ships also.’ No ‘misuse of neutral flags’ has ever been ordered by our Government. The destruction of a merchant-vessel or liner without warning or search, is not an incident ‘inevitable in sea warfare’; it is an incident always avoided in any sea warfare except that waged by barbarians.

A fortnight later the sinkings began; and on March 9 three ships were torpedoed, without warning, in one day. In the case of one of these, the Tangistan, 37 men were killed or drowned out of the 38 on board. On March 15 the stewardess and five men of the Fingal were drowned. And on the 27th the crew of the Aguila were fired upon while launching their boats; three were killed and several more wounded. On the 28th, the Elder-Dempster liner, the Falaba, from Liverpool to South Africa, was stopped and torpedoed in cold blood. As the crew and passengers sank, the Germans looked on from the deck of the U-boat, laughing and jeering at their struggling victims, of whom 111 perished. ‘The sinking of the Falaba,’ said the New York Times, ‘is perhaps the most shocking crime of the War.’

It did not long remain unsurpassed. In April, the German Embassy at Washington publicly advertised that vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or her allies were liable to destruction, and that travellers sailing in them would do so at their own risk. Intending travellers smiled at this outrageous threat and went on booking their passages to Europe. Even when those about to sail in the huge liner Lusitania received anonymous telegrams, warning them that the ship would be sunk, no one believed that the Government of a great Power could seriously intend such a crime. Not a single berth was countermanded, and, on May 1, the Lusitania sailed from New York, carrying, besides her crew of 651, no less than 1,255 passengers.

On the morning of Friday, May 7, she made her landfall on the Irish coast. The sea was dangerously calm; but Captain Turner, wishing ‘to reach the bar at Liverpool at a time when he could proceed up the river without stopping to pick up a pilot,’ reduced speed to 18 knots, holding on the ordinary course. At 2 P.M. the Lusitania passed the Old Head of Kinsale; at 2.15 she was torpedoed without warning, and without a submarine having been sighted by anyone on board. Her main steam-pipe was cut, and her engines could not be stopped; she listed heavily to starboard, and while she was under way it was very difficult to launch the boats. At 2.36 she went down, and of the 1,906 souls on board, 1,134 went down with her, only 772 being saved in the boats which got clear.

This was, for the German Government and the German Navy, an unparalleled disgrace. The German nation had still the chance of repudiating such a crime. But they knew no reason for repudiating it; it was congenial to their long-established character, and differed only in concentrated villainy from the countless murders and brutalities which had troubled the criminologists before the War. The German people adopted the crime as their own act, and celebrated it with universal joy. ‘The news,’ said the well-known Kölnische Zeitung, ‘will be received by the German people with unanimous satisfaction, since it proves to England and the whole world, that Germany is quite in earnest in regard to her submarine warfare.’ The Kölnische Volkszeitung, a prominent Roman Catholic and patriotic paper, was even more delighted. ‘With joyful pride we contemplate this latest deed of our Navy, and it will not be the last.’ The two words ‘joyful’ and ‘pride’ are here the mark of true savagery. Only savages could be joyful over the horrible death of a thousand women, children, and non-combatants; only savages could feel pride in the act, for it was in no way a difficult or dangerous feat. But this half-witted wickedness is clearly recognised in Germany as the national ideal. In the midst of the general exultation, when medals were being struck, holidays given to school children, and subscriptions got up for the ‘heroic’ crew of the U-boat, Pastor Baumgarten preached on the ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ and gave his estimate of the German character in these words: ‘Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve, from the bottom of his heart, the sinking of the Lusitania—whoever cannot conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty to countless perfectly innocent victims, and give himself up to honest delight at this victorious exploit of German defensive power—him we judge to be no true German.’

‘It will not be the last.’ The threat was soon made good. On August 9, of the same year, the White Star liner Arabic, one day out from Liverpool, was 60 miles from the Irish coast when she sighted the ss. Dunsley in a sinking condition. She naturally steered towards her; but as she approached, a submarine suddenly appeared from behind the Dunsley and torpedoed the Arabic without a moment’s warning. Boats were got out, but the ship sank in eight minutes and 30 lives were lost out of 424.

In both these cases the Germans, feeling that their joy and pride were not exciting the sympathy of neutral nations, afterwards tried to justify themselves by asserting that our liners carried munitions of war. This was obviously impossible in the case of the Arabic, which was bound from England to America. With regard to the Lusitania, an inquiry was held by Judge Julius Meyer of the Federal District Court of New York, who found that the Lusitania did not carry explosives, and added: ‘The evidence presented has disposed, without question and for all time, of any false claims brought forward to justify this inexpressibly cowardly attack on an unarmed passenger steamer.’

The year closed with the torpedoing, again without warning, on December 30, of the P. and O. liner Persia, from London to Bombay. She sank in five minutes, and out of a total of 501 on board, 335 were lost with her. Four of her boats were picked up after having been thirty hours at sea.

The year 1916 was a not less proud one for Germany; but it was distinctly less joyful. The American people took a fundamentally different view of war, especially of war at sea, and they began to express the difference forcibly. The German Government, after months of argument, was driven to make a show of withdrawing from the most extreme position. They admitted, on February 9, 1916, that their method was wrong where it involved danger to neutrals, and they offered to pay a money compensation for their American victims. They also repeated the pledge they had already given, and broken, that unarmed merchantmen should not be sunk without warning, and unless the safety of the passengers and crew could be assured; provided that the vessels did not try to escape or resist. This again is a purely savage line of thought; no civilised man could seriously claim that he was justified in killing unarmed non-combatants or neutrals by the mere fact of their running away from him. As for the ‘safety of passengers and crew,’ we shall see presently how that was ‘assured.’

But it matters little how the pledge was worded; it was never intended to be kept. Only six weeks after it was given, it was cruelly broken once more. On March 24, 1916, the French passenger steamer Sussex, carrying 270 women and children, and 110 other passengers, from Folkestone to Dieppe, was torpedoed without warning as she was approaching the French coast. Many were killed or severely injured by the explosion, others were drowned in getting out the boats. There were twenty-five Americans on board, and their indignation was intense; for the ship was unarmed, and carried no munitions or war stores of any kind. Nor, as President Wilson pointed out, did she follow the route of the transports or munition ships. She was simply a well-known passenger steamer, and eighty of her company on board were murdered in cold blood by pirates.

The President went on to say that the German Government ‘has failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation which has arisen, not only out of the attack on the Sussex but out of the whole method and character of submarine warfare as they appear in consequence of the practice of indiscriminate destruction of merchantmen, by commanders of German submarines. The United States Government,’ he continued, ‘has adopted a very patient attitude, and at every stage of this painful experience of tragedy upon tragedy, has striven to be guided by well-considered regard for the extraordinary circumstances of an unexampled war.... To its pain, it has become clear to it that the standpoint which it adopted from the beginning is inevitably right—namely, that the employment of submarines for the destruction of enemy trade is of necessity completely irreconcilable with the principles of humanity, with the long existing, undisputed rights of neutrals, and with the sacred privileges of non-combatants.’

This note touches the real point, and settles it; until the submarine is as powerfully armed and armoured, and manned with as large a crew as a cruiser of the ordinary kind, it is not a ship which can be used for the general purposes of blockade by any civilised nation. And it may be added that, even if the Germans had possessed submarines of a suitable kind, they could not have brought their prizes into port, because our Fleet and not theirs had the control of the seas. As it was, they pretended once more to submit, and gave nominal orders that merchant-vessels ‘shall not be sunk without warning and without saving human lives, unless these vessels attempt to escape or offer resistance.’

It was not intended that this third promise should be kept; there were other ways of evading the issue. The Rappahannock, a ship which sailed with a crew of 37, from Halifax, on October 17, 1916, was never heard of again, except in the wireless message by which the German Admiralty reported her destruction. The plan of sinking without a trace was first officially recommended by Count Luxburg, the German diplomatic agent in the Argentine; but the German Professor Flamm, of Charlottenburg, has also the honour of having proposed it in the paper Die Woche. ‘The best would be if destroyed neutral ships disappeared without leaving a trace, and with everything on board, because terror would very quickly keep seamen and travellers away from the danger zones, and thus save a number of lives.’ No doubt the Rappahannock was ‘spurlos versenkt’; so was the North Wales, and so were many others meant to be. The German method, in 1916, was to torpedo the ship, and then shell the survivors in their open boats. This was done in the cases of the Kildare and the Westminster, both sunk in the Mediterranean; but on neither occasion were the pirates successful in killing the whole of the crew, and their crime was therefore known and doubly execrated by the whole civilised world. None the less, they continued the hideous practice, and in the following eight months fired upon the helpless survivors of at least twelve ships, enumerated with authentic details in a list published by the Times on August 20, 1917.