The Secret Service Submarine: A Story of the Present War

END OF PART II

PART III

CHAPTER IX

OUT IN THE NORTH SEA. PREPARING FOR ACTION

The bees were humming through the orchard with a long, droning sound as I lay in the hammock of my old home, once more a careless boy. My eyes were closed, but the bright sun shone upon my face, and Peters, my father's old butler, was coming over the grass to tell me that tea was ready.

He touched my arm.

It was not Peters; it was a pale, clean-shaved fellow with an obsequious manner, who held a wooden bowl of steaming milk and coffee in his hands. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The deep, droning noise, which had seemed like the bees of childhood in my dream, was the noise of engines not far away. I had slept three hours in the hammock, as my brother had insisted, and here was the captured German waiter bringing me coffee. I took it, but half-awake, and watched the man go to two other hammocks which stretched away in front of me. The Dickson boys tumbled out of them and I became fully conscious of where I was.

For the moment, but only for a moment, I was unmanned. The horror of all that we had been through so recently rolled over me like a flood. The shambles that the submarine had become, the ruthless killing of fourteen men – the horrible little snick as I broke the back of my own victim!..

But it passed. The coffee was excellent and invigorating, and in a minute I tossed the empty bowl into the hammock and stood upon a steel grating, looking about me with wide eyes.

At that moment my brother came up, walking briskly, like a man at home. He seemed changed in some way, and I realised what it was – the policeman on his beat, and unbuttoned and at ease, the parson in his pulpit or trimming roses in the rectory garden, are two very different people.

"Where are we?" I said. "What has happened?"

"You've had a very good sleep, John. You went off like a log directly I had the hammock slung. It was necessary, too, or you'd never be fit for what is coming."

"Have we started?"

"Started!" he grinned. "We're thirty miles away from Morstone Marshes, abreast of Skegness, I should judge, which, as far as I can calculate, is about sixty miles to the westward – and heading straight out into the North Sea. We're just crossing the line of the Rotterdam boats from Hull."

"But there is no movement!"

"No, my son, because we're twenty-five feet under water, that's why. Now, you had better come and look round the boat; I shall have to explain everything to you and show you what you will have to do later on." He turned to the Dicksons. "You come, too," he said, "and if ever the three of you have your wits about you, have them now. You've got to learn in an hour or two what it takes an ordinary seaman six months to learn – or part of it, at any rate."

I am not going to describe everything I saw in detail. This is a story of action, and I always skip the descriptive parts in books, myself. The Johnnies only put them in to fill up. I expect they are paid so much a page, if the truth were known! Still, I must try and give some picture of the strange and unfamiliar world in which I found myself. Here I was sailing under the sea for all the world like someone in Jules Verne, experiencing something that only the tried men of the navies ever know.

I was in a long, narrow tunnel, most brilliantly lit. The air was warm and close, tainted a little with a faint suggestion of chemical fumes. It was rather like being in a chemist's shop in winter time when a large fire is burning.

Immediately to my right, the German waiter was busy over a little electric stove, in a doorless compartment not bigger than a bathing machine, Pots and pans hung above him and there were shelves covered with wire netting containing stores of food. We passed him, and I judged, from the breadth from side to side, that we were standing almost in the middle of the submarine.

Upon white-painted gratings, my brother's sailors moved here and there with bare feet, quiet and alert in their jumpers. The light was caught by, and reflected again, from innumerable pieces of shining machinery, brass and silver and dull bronze. There was a tension both of physical atmosphere and mental excitement, strange and unnatural to me, but which those who go beneath the waters and explore the mysterious deep always have with them.

We walked down a central gangway and stopped by two powerful gasolene engines, one on each side – long, lean, polished monsters, that lay inert, but ready to leap into action on the turn of a switch and the pulling of a lever.

"Those are the engines which run the boat when we are on the surface – 'awash,' we call it. We can do seventeen knots then – I am assuming that this German boat is about equal to one of our own of its class, though I have already come across several remarkable improvements in her. We are running now by electric motor and doing about twelve knots, which is first-class, but I'm pushing her along for all I know."

We passed onwards and to where Bosustow stood beaming over three great purring, spitting dynamos, a piece of cotton waste in one huge paw.

"Oh, they're daisies, sir," he said, as he patted coils of insulated wire in an ecstasy of appreciation. "They can show us something, sir, the Germans can. The sleeve that carries the commutator is keyed to the armature shaft on an entirely new system; it's a fair miracle of ingenuity. But where they beat us hollow is in the accumulators. I've not had time to inspect them thoroughly, but if we get out of this, then the whole of our system will have to be altered."

We all bent over a rail towards the great accumulator tanks below, and I felt a faint, acrid odour rising up from them.

"You're smelling electricity, sir," said Bosustow to me. Then he turned to a big, table-like switch-board which controlled the flow of current from below and commanded all the electrical machinery on board. He fingered the big, vulcanite handles as if he loved them and stroked the shining flanged rim of the volt meter as a mother strokes her child.

"Now Mr. Carey understands something about machinery, Bosustow," said my brother. "You can trust him to follow out your directions without making any blunders, I think. John, your station will be by Bosustow until you are wanted forrard, but there is no need for you to stay now. There is a good deal more that I must say."

All the voices were sharp and staccato, my own sounded like that in my ears when I answered. They echoed and rang in the heavy air of the sealed, steel tube, voices that were not quite free and natural, for all their readiness of tone.

We turned and went forward again, passing an open doorway and a few steps which led upwards to the conning-tower. The gangway ran at each side of it.

The long, tunnel-like vista grew narrower and the roof began to slope downward to a point. In front of us, in the extreme bows of the boat, were two huge, circular steel doors, like the doors of a safe, clamped and locked by an intricate mechanism.

"These are the mouths of the torpedo expulsion tubes," said Bernard. "We carry six torpedoes, I am glad to find – two more than I should have expected in a boat of this size – and, by Jove, we shall want 'em! If we throw away a single one, the game will be up, I expect. The torpedoes are run into these tubes along steel rails. They're discharged from the tubes by compressed air from the air tanks below. I see here the pressure is several thousand pounds to the square inch. In some boats we send out the tin fish by exploding a few ounces of cordite, but the air is the better way."

He turned to where Scarlett was busy and I saw a submarine torpedo for the first time. I confess there was a little inward shudder as I looked upon the deadly thing that could send the largest battleship afloat to the bottom in a few minutes. It was like a huge fish of steel with a large propeller at one end.

"These are beauties," Bernard said, "and to think that we are going to have the chance of using them against their original owners!" He chuckled.

"The propelling engines," he went on, "are inside – for you must remember that a torpedo is a little ship in itself and is not a projectile at all. There are three hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene in this beauty – we've done away with the old-fashioned gun-cotton now – and she's got a range of seven thousand yards – over four miles, Johnny, my boy! Now, Mr. Dickson and Mr. Harold Dickson, you will stay here with Scarlett. It will be your part, when we go into action, to fire these torpedoes. There ought to be six or seven of you to do it. There are only three, and two of you are quite untrained. Scarlett, get to work at once and give these gentlemen a practical drill. Show them exactly what they will have to do and explain the orders that will come from me. Miss out anything superfluous; remember we've hardly any time. Just teach them what is absolutely necessary."

"Aye, aye, sir!" said Scarlett, and as we turned back I heard him at once beginning his lecture.

And now we came to the most interesting part of that world of marvels, to the brain of the submarine. Adams stood in the first stage of the conning-tower, his hands upon a little leather-covered steering-wheel. In front of him was a gyroscopic compass and a row of speaking-tubes. A light threw a bright radiance upon a framed chart hanging on the wall, marked everywhere with faint purple pencil lines.

Bernard glanced at the compass and gave the man a few directions. Then we went up a short ladder of half a dozen rungs into the highest chamber of all.

It was perfectly circular. There was just room for two or three people, and the steel roof was two feet above our heads. A great tube came down through the roof and disappeared beneath the open grating of the floor. It was like the mast of a ship going through the cabin down to the very gar-board strike. There was a row of brass clock-faces with trembling needles and oddly shaped gauges, in which coloured liquid rose and fell. The whole ganglion of nerves met here in the cerebellum of the ship, and at a glance its commander knew exactly what she was doing, her speed, her depth below the surface of the water, the pressure – a thousand other things which I am not competent to name. The whimsical idea came to me that it was like lifting up the top of a man's head and seeing the thoughts which controlled every motion of his body.

There were charts, also, spread upon a semi-circular shelf of mahogany, with dividers, compasses, and a large magnifying glass.

Fastened to the wall, just above this shelf, was something that touched me strangely. It was a photograph in a silver frame, the photograph of a young, light-haired girl, and upon it was written in German, "An meinem lieber Otto."

Bernard saw it too and sighed. "It's the skipper's girl," he said. "Poor chap! he'll never see her again in this world! It was an ugly death to die, John!" and his voice had a note of deep feeling in it. "But it had to be, and Scarlett told me that he didn't know what hurt him.

"Now," he continued, "I'm going to show you something." He pulled out his watch and then, leaning over to the wall, he snapped over something like the stunted lever of a signal box. Then he pressed a button and a bell rang somewhere far down below. A hoarse voice sounded in our ears from a speaking-tube, and there was a quick, throbbing, pumping sound from the column in the wall.

Looking down, I saw that immediately below us was a circular white table. I put my hand on it and it was painted canvas, dazzlingly white.

"The periscope is going up," my brother said. "It should be light, now – watch!"

There was a click and the lamp in the roof went out. We were in darkness. A slight creaking sound, a movement of my brother's arm, and there flashed down, in clear light upon the table, a picture of the upper seas.

Forty feet above, the eye of the submarine surveyed the dawn, and in that still box where we stood, we saw it also.

Dawn upon the waters! A tossing grey expanse of waves. It was like the film of a cinematograph, only in colour, and as Bernard turned the wheel, picture after picture glided over the table – the most incredible thing!

Not a sail was in sight. The North Sea was an empty, tossing waste of waters in the cold light of the winter's dawn.

The dawn of – what?

CHAPTER X