ON A DOOMED U-BOAT

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 68, 14 December 1918, Page 8

ON A DOOMED U-BOAT

A TERRIBLE SCENE Stark horror! That alone wilt describe the scene in a certain' German submarino which went to the bottom after striking a mine. She left £eebrugge a few days before that nest was sealed by the -British blockships, ami she was commanded by one of the most successful of the pirates, a man on whom decoration after decoration had been showered by the Kaiser .since the beginning of the. war. An external explosion shook the submarine. It was not enough to blast her to fragments. It only sent her staggering downwards stern first, her bowspointing upwards. The electric light failed; and much of her delicate machinery was thrown out of gear. After a struggle, the engineers put the lighting to rights, but their efforts to bring the boat on an even keel failed until, as a last resource, the crew were ordered to rush forward in a body. Then her bows came down, find she rested on the bed of tho ocean. There was another effect, however. Water began to ooze in between the plates aft, which had been strained by the explosion. While some men tried to stop the leaks, others wrestled with the complex genr that should blow Hie ballast tanks, and tried to start (lie engine to take her tp the surface. All failed. The water oozed in, and the submarine lay motionless. She wus more than twenty fathoms deep, and at 120 feet the pressure of water on the outside was so heavy that neither iho torpedo hatches nor the, conning lower could be opened to lot.(he imprisoned men out so that they might take their chance of drowning or of reaching the surface. Still the water mounted in the interior, It soaked into the accumulators, and, mingling with the chemicals there, began to generate minute quantities of poison gas. The men were crowded forward, fihriekiiijT to their comrades to hurry up in opening the hatches. The water lappejl over their ankles and crept up their legs. The air became dense. H was used up, and it was impregnated with poison. The water reached knees. The men who were fighting with the hatches dropped back exhausted, their hands maimed and bleeding from their frenzied exertions. They clung to any' foothold, above tha water that crept up and ever up remorselessly. •Sixty minutes had gone by since the fateful explosion. Even if tho hutche3 were opened there was little hope that they could survive the sudden exposure to the pressure of the water, at that depth, and {or some reason* the .U-boat carried none of the special life-saving waistcoats with oxygen supply tubes which ought, to have been on board. , . • The imprisoned men cared nothing for that. "Open! Open!" they screamed. '.Their .mod panic grew. One man euddonly stuffed some cotton woo! up his nostrils and Hung himself into, the two feet, of water that swirled uneasily he'.neath the paling lights. His example was followed. One after another men sought the relief of death from,the awful oppression of life. By a strange freak of the brain one'man who feared to drown sought to shoot himself, but the revolver missed h're. With »n oath he hurled it into the pool of death and flung himself after it. At that , moment nn aperture gave. Water .poured in, equalising the pressure within and without, and one of the torpedo hatches of the conning-tower hatch ivas' forced open. The air pressure shot out the ' still living and the already dead together—but the dead were the happier. Tin pressure bursi the lungs of the living, as. they were flung upwards,. and they shot through the surface of the water shrieking in horrible death agonies. A British trawler was near. Never in all the strange months of war had fishermen seen such things as they saw in ' those few dreadful seconds. Two only of all that submarine crew were living among the bodies that were taken on board the trawler. Their sufferings were an epitome of all tho rest.