Chapter II: Into the Dark

I got to the Port of the Submarines just as an uncertain and rainy afternoon had finally decided to turn into a wild and disagreeable night. Short, drenching showers of rain fell one after the other like the strokes of a lash, a wind came up out of the sea, and one could hear the thunder of surf on the headlands. The mother ship lay moored in a wild, desolate and indescribably romantic bay; she floated in a sheltered pool a very oasis of modernity, a marvellous creature of another world and another time. There was just light enough for me to see that her lines were those of a giant yacht. Then a curtain of rain beat hissing down upon the sea, and the ship and the vague darkening landscape disappeared, disappeared as if it might have melted away in the shower. Presently the bulk of the vessel appeared again: gliding and tossing at once we drew alongside, and from that moment on, I was the guest of the vessel, recipient of a hospitality and courtesy for which I here make grateful acknowledgment to my friends and hosts.

The mother ship of the submarines was a combination of flag ship, supply station, repair shop and hotel. The officers of the submarines had rooms aboard her which they occupied when off patrol, and the crews off duty slung their hammocks 'tween decks. The boat was pretty well crowded, having more submarines to look after than she had been built to care for, but thanks to the skill of her officers, everything was going as smoothly as could be. The vessel had, so to speak, a submarine atmosphere. Everybody aboard lived, worked and would have died for the submarine. They believed in the submarine, believed in it with an enthusiasm which rested on pillars of practical fact. The Chief of Staff was the youngest captain in our Navy, a man of hard energy and keen insight, one to whom our submarine service owes a very genuine debt. His officers were specialists. The surgeon of the vessel had been for years engaged in studying the hygiene of submarines, and was constantly working to free the atmosphere of the vessels from deleterious gases and to improve the living conditions of the crews. I remember listening one night to a history of the submarine told by one of the officers of the staff, and for the first time in my life I came to appreciate at its full value the heroism of the men who risked their lives in the first cranky, clumsy, uncertain little vessels, and the imagination and the faith of the men who believed in the type. Ten years ago, a descent in a sub was an adventure to be prefaced by tears and making of wills; to-day submarines are chasing submarines hundreds of miles at sea, are crossing the ocean, and have grown from a tube of steel not much larger than a life boat to underwater cruisers which carry six-inch guns. Said an officer to me:

"The future of the submarine? Why, sir, the submarine is the only war vessel that's going to have a future!"

On the night of my arrival, once dinner was over, I went on deck and looked down through the rain at the submarines moored alongside. They lay close by, one beside the other, in a pool of radiance cast by a number of electric lights hanging over each open hatchway. Beyond this pool lay the rain and the dark; within it, their sides awash in the clear green water of the bay, their grey bridges and rust-stained superstructures shining in the rain, lay the strange, bulging, crocodilian shapes of steel. There was something unearthly, something not of this world or time in the picture; I might have been looking at invaders of the sleeping earth. The wind swept past in great booming salvoes; rain fell in sloping, liquid rods through the brilliancy of electric lamps burning with a steadiness that had something in it of strange, incomprehensible and out of place in the motion and hullabaloo of the storm. And then, too, a hand appeared on the topmost rung of the nearer ladder, and a bulky sailor, a very human sailor in very human dungarees, poked his head out of the aperture, surveyed the inhospitable night, and disappeared.

"He's on Branch's boat. They're going out to-night," said the officer who was guiding me about.

"To-night? How on earth will he ever find his way to the open sea?"

"Knows the bay like a book. However, if the weather gets any worse, I doubt if the captain will let him go. George will be wild if they don't let him out. Somebody has just reported wreckage off the coast, so there must be a Hun round."

"But are not our subs sometimes mistaken for Germans?"

"Oh, yes," was the calm answer.

I thought of that ominous phrase I had noted in the British records "failed to report," and I remembered the stolid British captain who had said to me, speaking of submarines, "Sometimes nobody knows just what happened. Out there in the deep water, whatever happens, happens in a hurry." My guide and I went below to the officers' corridor. Now and then, through the quiet, a mandolin or guitar could be heard far off twanging some sentimental island ditty, and beneath these sweeter sounds lay a monotonous mechanical humming.

"What's that sound?" I asked.

"That's the Filipino mess boys having a little festino in their quarters. The humming? Oh, that's the mother-ship's dynamos charging the batteries of Branch's boat. Saves running on the surface."

My guide knocked at a door. Within his tidy, little room, the captain who was to go out on patrol was packing the personal belongings he needed on the trip.

"Hello, Jally!" he cried cheerily when he saw us. "Come on in. I am only doing a little packing up. What's it like outside?"

"Raining same as ever, but I don't think it's blowing up any harder."

"Hooray!" cried the young captain with heart-felt sincerity. "Then I'll get out to-night. You know the captain told me that if it got any worse he'd hold me till to-morrow morning. I told him I'd rather go out to-night. Perfect cinch once you get to the mouth of the bay, all you have to do is submerge and take it easy. What do you think of the news? Smithie thinks he saw a Hun yesterday.... Got anything good to read? Somebody's pinched that magazine I was reading. Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, that ought to be enough handkerchiefs.... Hello, there goes the juice."

The humming of the dynamo was dying away slowly, fading with an effect of lengthening distance. The guitar orchestra, as if to celebrate its deliverance, burst into a triumphant rendering of Sousa's "Stars and Stripes."

My guide and I waited till after midnight to watch the going of Branch's Z5. Branch and his second, wearing black oilskins down whose gleaming surface ran beaded drops of rain, stood on the bridge; a number of sailors were busy doing various things along the deck. The electric lights shone in all their calm unearthly brilliance. Then slowly, very slowly, the Z5 began to gather headway, the clear water seemed to flow past her green sides, and she rode out of the pool of light into the darkness waiting close at hand.

"Good-bye! Good luck!" we cried.

A vagrant shower came roaring down into the shining pool.

"Good-bye!" cried voices through the night.

Three minutes later all trace of the Z5 had disappeared in the dark.