WITH THE 'DIVERS'

Taranaki Daily News, 22 January 1916, Page 9

WITH THE 'DIVERS'

■ FRINGES OF THE FLEET." ETPLING VISITS THE SUBMARINES. LIFE OX THE UNDER-WATER CRAFT. I was honored by a glimpse into his Veiled life by a boat which was merely practising between trips. Submarines are like fats. They never tell whom they were with last night and they sleep as much as they can. If you board a submarine off duty you generally see a perspective of foreshortened fattisli men laid all along. The men say that except at certain times it is rather an easy life, with relaxed regulations about smoking, calculated to make a man put on flesh, One requires wellpadded nerves. Many of the men do not appear on deck throughout the whole trip. After all, why should they if they don't want to? They know that they are responsible in their department for their comrades' lives as their comrades are responsible for theirs. , •'What's the use of flapping about? Better lay in some magazines and cigarettes. When x we set forth there had been Some trouble in the fairway and a mined neutral, whose misfortune" all bore with exemplary calm, lay over on a sandtank near by. "Suppose there are more mines loose!" } asked. ■YOtJ HIT 'EM OR YOU DON'T. "We'll hope there aren't," was the Soothing reply. "Mines are all Joss. You either hit 'em or you don't. And if you do they don't always go off. They scrape alongside." "What's the etiquette then?" "Shut off both propellers and hope." We were Bodging various craft down the harbor when a squadron of trawlers came out on our beam, at that extravagant rate of speed which unlimited Government coal always leads to. They were pleaded by an ugly, upstanding, black-sided buccaneer with Impounders. "Ah! That's the king of the trawlers. Isn't he carrying dog, too! Give him loom!" one said. We were all in the narrowed harbor mouth together"There's my youngest daughter. Take a look at her!" some one hummed as a punctilious navy cap slid by on a very near bridge. "We'll fall in behind him. They're going over to the neutral. Then they'll sweep. By-the-bye, did you hear about one of the passengers in the neutral yesterday? He was taken off, of course, by ft destroyer, and the only thing he said was: "Twenty-five times I 'ave insured, but apt this tijue. 'Ang it J* ' 3ESTROYER PASSES. . 'Ale trawlers lunged ahead toward Ihe forlorn neutral. Our destroyer nip/ped past us with that high-shouldered, terrier-like pouncing action of the newer boats, and went ahead. A tramp in ballast, her propeller half way out of the water, threshed along through the sallow haze. "Lord! What a shot!" someone said, 'enviously. The men on the little deck looked across at the slow-moving silhouette. One of them, a cigarette behind his ear, smiled at a companion. Then we went down, not as they go 'down when they are pressed (the Tecord, I believe, is 60 feet in 50 seconds from top to bottom, but genteelly to an orchestra of appropriate sounds, roarings and blowings, and after the orders, which , come from the commander alone, utter silence and-jieaee. ■ "There's the bottom, We bumped »t 50—52!" -3 " "I didn't feel it.'" "We'll try again, Watcfl the guage •nd you'll see it flick a little." HEX BETTER THAN MACHINES. It may have been so, but I was more interested in the faces, and, a/bove all, the eyes, all down the length of her. It was to them, of course, the simplest of manoeuvres. They dropped into gear as no machine could; but the training of .years and the experience of the year leaped up behind those steady eyes under the electrics in the shadow of the tall motors, between the pipes and curved hull, or glued to their particular gauges. One forgot the bodies altogether, but one will never forget the eyes, or the ennobled faces. One man I remember in patieular. On deck his was not more than a grave, rather striking countenance, cast in the unmistakable petty officer's mould. Below, as I saw his profile in charge of a vitrol control,,he looked like a Doge of Venice; the p"ior of some hardly-ruled monastic order; an old-time Pope—anything that signified trained and stored "intellectual power utterly and escetically devoted to some vast impersonal end. And so with »• much younger man, who changed into siieh a young monk as Frank Dicksee used to draw. Only a couple of torpedo men, not being gear for the moment, read an illustrated paper. Their time did not come till we went up and got to business, which meant firing at our destroyer, and, I think, keeping out of the light of a friend's torpedoes. , FUN FOR THE COMMANDER. The attack and everything connected with it is solely the commander's affair. He is the only one who gets any fun at "11—Since he is the eye, the brain and the hand of the whole—this single figure of the periscope. The second in command heaves sighs, and prays that the dummy (there is less trouble about real ones) will go off all right or he'll be told afbout it. The others wait and follow the quick run of orders. It is, if not a convention, a fairly established custom, that the commander shall inferentially give his world some idea of what >b going on. At least, I only heard of one man who says nothing whatever, and doesn't even wriggle his shoulders when he is on "the job. The others solildquise, etc., according to their temperament, and the periscope is as revealing as golf. Submarines nowadays are expected to lock out for themselves more than at the old practices when the destroyers walked circumspectly. We lived and circulated under water for a while, ani then" rose for a sight—something like this: "Up a. little—up;,up still; where the deuce has he—ah! (half a dozen ordcrras to helm and depth or descent, and a pause, broken by a drumming noise somewhere above, which increases Alid passes away). That's better. Up again. (This refers to the periscope).! Yes. • Ah, no; we don't think. All right. Keep lier down; damn it! Umm. That ought to be 19 knots. . . . Dirty

trick! He's changing speed. No, he isn't. He's all right! Ready forward there! (A valve sputters and drips, the torpedo men crouch over their tubes and nod. to themselves. Their faces have changed' now). He hasn't spotted U3 yet. We'll just—(more helm and depth orders, but specially helm). Wißh we •were Working a beam tube Ne'er mind. Sp! (A last string of orders}.. Sixfoun•red. /He doew't iee ufc Firer?

SPRAY ENTERS HATCH. The dummy left. The second in command cocked one ear, and looked relieved. Up we rose; .the wet air and spray spattered through the hatch. The destroyer swung off to retrieve the dummy. "Careless brutes, destroyers are!" said one officer. ''That fellow nearly walked over us just now. Did you notice!" The commander was playing his game i out over again, stroke by stroke. "With a beam tube I'd lia' strafted him amidships," he concluded. ''Why didn't you, then ?" I asked. There were several excellent reasons, which reminded me that we were at war, and cleared for action, and that the interlude had been merely play. A companion rose alongside, and wanted to know whether we had seen anything of her dummy. "No; but we heard it," was the short answer. I was rather annoyed, because I nad seen that particular daughter of destruction in the stocks only a short time ago; and here she was, grown up and talking about her missing children! MORE SUBMARINES BUILDING. In the harbor again, one found more of them, all patterns and makes and sizes, with rumors of yet more and larger to follow. Naturally their men say that we are only at the beginning of the submarine. We shall have them presently for all purposes. Now here is the mystery of the service. A man gets a boat which for two years becomes his very self. His morning hope, his evening dream, His joy throughout the day. With hi.m i 3 a second ,in command, a cox, an engineer, and some others. They prove each other's souls habitually, every few days, by the direct test of peril, till they act, think and endure as a unit, in and with the boat. That commander is transferred to another boat. He tries to take with him, if he can, which he can't, as many of his other selves as possible. He pitches into a new type twice the size of the old one, with three times as nfany gadgets, an unexplored temperament, and unknown leanings After his first trip he comes back clamoring for the head of her constructor, oi his own second in command, his engineer, his cox, and a few other ratings They for their part wish him dead oh the beach, because last commission witli So-and-So nothing ever went wrong anywhere. A fortnight later you can remind the commander of what he said; he will, smile large, wide Navy 6railes. She's' not, he says, so very bad —things considered, barring her five-ton torpedo-der-ricks, the abominations of her wireless, and the tropical temperature of her beel lockers. All of which signifies that th? new boat has found her soul, and he/ commander would not change her for battle-cruisers. . Therefore, that he may remember he is the service, and not a branch of it, he is after certain years shifted to a battle-cruiser, where lje lives in a blaze of admirals and aiguilettes, responsible for vast decks and cathedral-like flats, a student of extended above water tactics, thinking in ten 9 of thousands of yards instead of his modest but deadly three to 1200.

THE OTHER MAN FORGETS. And the man who takes his place straightway forgets that he ever looked down on great- rollers from a 60-foot bridge under the whole breadth of heaven, but crawls and climbs and dives down conning towers with those same waves wet on his heels, and when the cruisers pass him tearing the deep open in half a gale, thanks God he is not as they are and goes to bed Beneath their distracted keels. For it is written:. How in ail time of our dietfess And in our triumph, too, The game is more than the player of the game, And the ship more than the crew. "But submarine wtrlc is cold-blooded business." (This was at a little conference in a green-curtained "wardroom" cum owner* cabin). "Then there's no truth in the yarn that you can feel when the torpedo's going to get home;" I asked. * "Not a word. You see it get home or miss as the case may be. Of course, it's never 'your' fault if it misses. It's all your second in command." "That's true, too," said the second "I catch it all round. That's what I am here for." "And what about the third man:' There was one aboard at the time. He generally comes from a smaller boat—to pick lip real work if lie can suppress his intellect and doesn't talk 'last commission." The third hand promptly denied the possession of any. intellect, and was quite dumb about his last boat. "And the men?" ALL IX COLD BLOOD. "They train on, too. They train each other. Yes, one gets to know 'em about as well as they get to know us. Up topside a man can take you in—take himself in—for months, for half the commission, perhaps. Down below he can't. It's all in cold blood—not like at the front, where they .have something exciting all the time.'' "Then humping mines isn't exciting?" "Not one little bit. You can bump at 'em. Even with a Zcpp " "Oh, now and then " one interrupted, and they laughed as they explained "Yes, that was rather funny One of our boats came up slap underneath a low Zepp. Looked for the Bky, you know, and couldn't see anything except this fat shining belly almost on top of 'em. Luckily it wasn't the Zepp's stingin' end. So she went to windward and kept just awash. There was a bit of a sea, and the Zepp had to work against the wind. (They don't like that). Out boat 6ent a man to the gun. He was pretty well drowned, of course, hut he hung on, and held his breath and got in shots where he could. Hie Zepp was strafing bombs about for all she was worth, and—who was it?— Macartney, I think, was shifting and' heaving at "the quickfirer between dives, and naturally 'everyone wanted to look at the performance, so about a quarter of a ton of water flopped down below, and—oh, they had a Charlie Chaplin time of it! Well, somehow Macartney managed to rip the Zepp a bit, and she went to leeward with a list on her. We saw her a fortnight later with a patch on her port side. Oh, if Fritz only fought clean there wouldn't be half a bad show. But Fritz can't fight clean." ' does fiht;: ODKnsTAxn? "And we can't do what he does—even if we were allowed to," one said. "No. we can't. 'Tisn't done. That's all. We have to ffsh Fritz out of the water, and we drive him and dust him and give him cocktails and send him to Donnington Hall." . , "And what doe; Fritz do?" "He sputters and clicks and bows. He has all the correct motions, you know, but, of course, when he's a prisoner yon can't tell him what he really is." "And do you suppose Fritz under-

stands any of it?" I asked. "No. Ot he wouldn't have Lusitamaed, and then he wouldn't have been Fritz. This war was his first chance of making his name, and he chucked it all away for the sake of shown* oil' as a silly 'ass of a Gottstrafer."

And then they talked of that hour of the night when submarines come to the top like mermaids to get and give information; of boats whose business it is to fire as much and to splash about as aggressively as possible, and of other boats who avoid any sort of display—dumb boata watching and relicvin" watch, with their periscopes just show" ing like a crocodile's e.ves at the back of islands and the mouths of channels where something may some day move out in procession to its doom.