ON A DOOMED U-BOAT.

Matamata Record, Volume III, Issue 114, 9 January 1919, Page 2

ON A DOOMED U-BOAT.

A Terrible Scene. Stark horror 1 That alone will describo the scene in a certain German submarine which went to the bottom after striking a mine. She left Zeebrugge a few days before that nest was sealed by the British blockships, and sho 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 bows pointing 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 and she rested on the bed of the 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 gear that should blow the ballast tanks, and tried to start the engine to take her to the surface. The water oozed in, and the submarine lay motionless. She was more than twenty fathoms deep, and at 120 feet the pressure of water on the outside was so heavy that neither the torpedo hatches nor the- conning-tower could be opened to let 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, shrieking to their comrades to hurry up in opening the hatches. The water lapped over their ankles and crept up their legs. The air became dense. It was used up, and it was impregnated with poison. The water reached their 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 the water that crept up and ever up remorselessly. Sixty minutes had gone by since the fateful explosion. Even if the hatches were opened there was little hope that they could survive the sudden exposure to the pressure of the water at that depth, and for some reason the U-boat carried none of the special live-saving waistcoat with oxygen supply tubes which ought to have been on board. The imprisoned men cared nothing for that. “ Open 1 Open !’’ they screamed. Their mad panic grew. One man suddenly stuffed some cotton wool up his nostrils and flung himself into the two feet of water that swirled uneasily beneath 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 fire. With an oath he hurled it into the pool of death and flung himself after it. * At that moment an aperture gave. Water poured in, equalising the pressure within and without, and one of the torpedo hatches of the conning-tower hatch was forced open. The air pressure shot out the still living and the already dead together—but the dead were the happier. The pressure burst the lungs of the living, as 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 the rest.