Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1138 page)

The ships destroy us above
And ensnare us beneath.
We arise, we lie down, and we move In the belly of Death.

The ships have a thousand eyes
To mark where we come . .
And the mirth of a seaport dies
When our blow gets home.

Submarines

II

I was honoured by a glimpse into this veiled I life in a boat which was merely practising between trips. Submarines are like cats. They never tell ‘who 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 fore - shortened fattish 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 well-padded 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 we set forth there had been some trouble in the fairway, and a mined neutral, whose misfortune all bore with exemplary calm, was careened on a near by shoal.

‘Suppose there are more mines knocking about?’ I suggested.

‘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 dodging various craft down the harbour 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 led by an ugly, upstanding, black- sided buccaneer with twelve-pounders.

‘Ah! That’s the King of the Trawlers, Isn’t he carrying dog, too! Give him room!’ one said.

We were all in the narrowed harbour 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 a destroyer, and the only thing he said was:

“Twenty-five time I ‘ave insured, but not this time. . . . ‘Ang it !’

The trawlers lunged ahead toward the forlorn neutral. Our destroyer nipped past us with that high-shouldered, terrier-like pouncing action of the newer boats, and went ahead. A tramp in ballast, her propeller half out of water, threshed along through the sallow haze.

‘Lord! What a shot!’ somebody 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 when they are pressed (the record, I believe, is 50 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 peace.

‘There’s the bottom. We bumped at fifty — fifty-two,’ he said.

‘I didn’t feel it’

‘We’ll try again. Watch the gauge, and you’ll see it flick a little.’

The Practice of the Art

It may have been so, but I was more interested in the faces, and above 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 the curved hull, or glued to their special gauges. One forgot the bodies altogether — but one will never forget the eyes or the ennobled faces. One man I remember in particular. On deck his was no more than a grave, rather striking countenance, cast in the unmistakable petty officer’s mould, Below, as I saw him in profile handling a vital control, he looked like the Doge of Venice; the Prior of some sternly-ruled monastic order; an old-time Pope — anything that signifies trained and stored intellectual power utterly and ascetically devoted to some vast impersonal end. And so with a much younger man, who changed into such a monk as Frank Dicksee used to draw. Only a couple of torpedo-men, not being in 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.

The attack and everything connected with it is solely the commander’s affair. He is the only one who gets any fun at all — since he is the eye, the brain, and the hand of the whole — this single figure at the periscope. The second in command heaves sighs, and prays that the dummy torpedo (there is less trouble about the live ones) will go off all right, or he’ll be told about 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 is 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 sight. The others soliloquise, etc., according to their temperament; and the periscope is as revealing as golf.

Submarines nowadays are expected to look out for themselves more than at the old practices, when the destroyers walked circumspectly. We dived and circulated under water for a while, and then rose for a sight — something like this: ‘Up a little — up! Up still! Where the deuce has he got to — Ah (Half a dozen orders as to helm and depth of descent, and a pause broken by a drumming noise somewhere above, which increases and passes away.) That’s better! Up again! (This refers to the periscope.) Yes. Ah -I- No, we don’t think! All right! Keep her down, damn it! Umm! That ought to be nineteen 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 us yet. We’ll ju-ust — (more helm and depth orders, but specially helm) — ’Wish we were working a beam-tube. Ne’er mind !, Up! (A last string of orders,) Six hundred, and he doesn’t see us! Fire!’

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 out over again — stroke by stroke, ‘With a beam-tube I’d ha’ strafed him amidships,’ he concluded.

‘Why didn’t you then?’ I asked,

There were loads of shiny 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 had seen that particular daughter of destruction on the stocks only a short time ago, and here she was grown up and talking about her missing children. In the harbour again, one found more submarines, all patterns and makes and sizes, with rumours 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.

The Man and the Work

Now here is a 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 him is a second in command, 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 is pitched into a new type twice the size of the old one, with three times as many gadgets, an unexplored temperament and unknown leanings. After his first trip he comes back clamouring for the head of her constructor, of his own second in command, his engineer, his cox, and a few other ratings. They for their part wish him dead on the beach, because, last commission with So-and-so, nothing ever went wrong anywhere. A fortnight later you can remind the commander of what he said, and he will deny every word of it. She’s not, he says, so very vile — things considered, barring her five-ton torpedo-derricks, the abominations of her wireless, and the tropical temperature of her beer-lockers. All of which signifies that the new boat has found her soul, and her 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 seasons shifted to a battle-cruiser, where he lives in a blaze of admirals and aiguillettes, responsible for vast decks and crypt-like flats, a student of extended above-water tactics, thinking in tens of thousands of yards instead of his modest but deadly three to twelve hundred.

And the man who takes his place straightway forgets that he ever looked down on great rollers from a sixty-foot bridge under the whole breadth of heaven, but crawls and climbs and dives through conning-towers with those same waves wet in his neck, 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.

Expert Opinions

‘But submarine work is cold-blooded business.’

(This was at a little session in a green-curtained ‘wardroom’ cum owner’s 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 sometimes 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 up real work — if he 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?’

‘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 a commission, p’rhaps. 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 bumping mines isn’t exciting?’

‘Not one little bit. You can’t bump back at ‘em. Even with a Zepp

‘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 sky, 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 our boat went to windward and kept lust awash. There was a bit of a sea, and the Zepp had to work against the wind. (They don’t like that.) Our boat sent a man to the gun. He was pretty well drowned, of course, but he hung on, choking and spitting, and held his breath, and got in shots where he could. This Zepp was strafing bombs about for all she was worth, and — who was it? Macartney, I think, potting at her between dives; and naturally all hands wanted to look at the performance, so about half the North Sea 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, this wouldn’t be half a bad show. But Fritz can’t fight clean.’

‘And we can’t do what he does — even if we were allowed to,’ one said.

‘No, we can’t. ‘Tisn’t done. We have to fish Fritz out of the water, dry him, and give him cocktails, and send him to Donnington Hall.’

‘And what does Fritz do?’ I asked.

‘He sputters and clicks and bows. He has all the correct motions, you know; but, of course, when he’s your prisoner you can’t tell him what he really is.’

‘And do you suppose Fritz understands any of it?’ I went on.

‘No. Or he wouldn’t have lusitaniaed. This war was his first chance of making his name, and he chucked it all away for the sake of showin’ off as a foul Gottstrafer.’

And 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 boats watching and relieving watch, with their periscope just showing like a crocodile’s eye, at the back of islands and the mouths of channels where something may some day move out in procession to its doom.