The thing most astonishing to me about that experience was how a submerged submarine can thread its way through a mine field. For though the water is luminous and translucent one can hardly make out the black hull of the boat under the turret and a mine would have to be on top of you before you could see it. The men who watch for mines must have a sense for them as well as particularly powerful sight.
We continued to dive until we were sixty-eight feet below the surface, too deep to strike any mine, and there we ran tranquilly on our electric engines, while the commander navigated the vessel and the second in command opened champagne in the two by four mess room. After half an hour of underwater work we came near enough the surface for our fighting periscope to stick twenty inches out of the water and searched the lonely horizon for a ship to attack.
It was not long before we sighted a mine trawler, steaming for the harbour, and speeded up to overtake her.
"Pikers!" said our commander, as we circled twice around the trawler; "they can't find us."
Five men on the trawler were scanning the sea with glasses looking for submarines. We could follow all their motions, could tell when they thought they had found us and see their disappointment at their mistakes, but though we were never more than five hundred yards from them, I did not think they were pikers because they did not find us. I had tried that hunt for the tiny wave of a periscope.
"No use wasting a torpedo on those fellows," said our commander. "We will use the gun on them."
"How far away can you use a torpedo?" I asked.
"Two hundred yards is the best distance," he said. "Never more than five hundred. A torpedo is pure guesswork at more than five hundred yards."
We crossed the bow of the trawler, circled around to her starboard quarter and came to the surface, fired nine shots and submerged again in forty-five seconds.
The prey secured, we ran submerged through the mine field and past the net barrier to come to the surface well within the harbour and proceed peacefully to our mooring under the shelter of the guns of the land forts.
Life and work on a German submarine is known to us, of course, only from descriptions in German publications. One of these appeared, previous to our entry in the war, in various journals and was translated and republished by the New York Evening Post. It reads partly as follows:
"U-47 will take provisions and clear for sea. Extreme economical radius."
A first lieutenant, with acting rank of commander, takes the order in the grey dawn of a February day. The hulk of an old corvette with the Iron Cross of 1870 on her stubby foremast is his quarters in port, and on the corvette's deck he is presently saluted by his first engineer and the officer of the watch. On the pier the crew of U-47 await him. At their feet the narrow grey submarine lies alongside, straining a little at her cables.
"Well, we've our orders at last," begins the commander, addressing his crew of thirty, and the crew grin. For this is U-47's first experience of active service. She has done nothing save trial trips hitherto, and has just been overhauled for her first fighting cruise. Her commander snaps out a number of orders. Provisions are to be taken in "up to the neck," fresh water is to be put aboard, and engine-room supplies to be supplemented.
A mere plank is the gangway to the little vessel. As the commander, followed by his officers, comes aboard, a sailor hands to each a ball of cotton-waste, the sign and symbol of a submarine officer, which never leaves his hand. For the steel walls of his craft, the doors, and the companion-ladder all sweat oil, and at every touch the hands must be wiped dry. The doorways are narrow round holes. Through one of the holes aft the commander descends by a breakneck iron ladder into the black hole lit by electric glow-lamps. The air is heavy with the smell of oil, and to the unaccustomed longshoreman it is almost choking, though the hatches are off. The submarine man breathes this air as if it were the purest ozone. Here in the engine-room aft men must live and strain every nerve even if for days at a time every crack whereby the fresh air could get in is hermetically sealed. On their tense watchfulness thirty lives depend.
