Part 29

"Save money as I go along? I don't figure on it--not with a family and trying to give them the kind of food they need and the little things that live boys and girls--especially girls--care as much for as the grub they eat and the clothes they wear. But if I do spend all my pay, my family are getting the good of it, I don't go into the discard at the end. And when I'm up on a shaky roof in a bad fire, maybe I'll be more ready to take a chance, knowing that if I go through and cripple myself, there's something coming to the wife and family after it."

The fireman's argument holds for the navy, except that in the navy they get through younger and with a bigger pension.

Is there any romance in the navy nowadays? Who can answer for all? Probably as much now as ever there was. Why should substituting smoke-pipes for spars, and propellers for sails, kill the thing that thrills us? I've seen men washing down decks of a tropic morning, and, ninety miles inland, old Orizaba showing his white head above the clouds; and some of those men thought it was slow work and others thought it was great.

On a scout cruiser to African ports, or a thousand miles up a Chinese river on a gunboat, among the South Sea Islands on a light cruiser, some men return with dumb lips and others can keep you awake till morning with the tales of what they've seen.

A nineteen-year-old big-gun pointer sits atop of his bicycle saddle, and the enemy fleet is swinging into range. Will it be like shooting clay pipes in a gallery or will a warmer wave go rolling through his veins as he presses the button?

Romance! Is it something always dead and gone, or something a man carries around with him?

Whatever it is, the navy is there to try it out, and no danger of starving while we try it.

THE SEA BABIES

Submarines have been cutting a large figure in this war. There is probably a general curiosity to know how they are operated. I know I was curious to know, and, Collier's having secured me permission from the Electric Boat Company, I went over to Cape Cod to take in a trial trip or two of some boats they were building for the British Government.

There was one all ready for sea.

Long and narrow, and modelled like a stretched-out egg she was, with one end of the egg running to a point by way of a stern, and the other flattened to an up-and-down wedge-like bow. A heavy black line marked her run.

Below her run she was tinted to the pale green of inshore waters, and to a grayish blue above. Everything above her deck, which was only a raised fore-and-aft platform for the crew to walk on, with countless little round scupper-holes in its sides--above the deck her conning-tower, and above that again her periscope casing--all were blue-gray.

The feeling of the morning was of heavy wind and rain or snow to come; and a hard, cold breath of the sea and a taste of the rain were already on us as we crossed the plank from the mother ship to the deck of the "sub" and, one after the other, fitted ourselves into the main hatchway and wiggled down into her.

Our submarine, from the inside, was an amazing collection of engines, tanks, gauges, tubes, pipes, valves, wheels, torpedoes, tube heads, electric registers, electric lights, and whatnot. A flat steel floor ran from the forward end to the engine-room aft. Between the floor and the arched deck overhead were three heavy steel bulkheads with heavy steel doors. A narrow iron skeleton ladder led up to her conning-tower; small steel rungs bolted to the casing showed the way to a square after-deck hatch.

When all the others of us were below, the captain came squeezing down from the conning-tower hatch and took his position at the periscope.

To the captain's left stood a man whose job it was to hold the sub to the depth of water desired. This was the diving-rudder man, a most expert one, we were told, who had been known to hold a submerged sub at full speed to within six inches of one depth for two miles at a stretch. A thin brass scale and a curved tube of colored water with an air bubble in it helped out the diving-rudder man's calculations. The least deviation of the sub's course from the horizontal and these two instruments, lit up by electric lamps, showed it at once. There was a big dial, with a long green hand, which also marked the depth of the sub; but that was an insensitive and rather slow-acting gauge--all right for the crew to look at from half the length of the sub, but not fine or quick enough for the diving-rudder man.

He was the busy man while we were under water. The others could now and again grab a moment of relaxation from their tenseness, but while the sub was moving the diving-rudder man never took his eyes off the little brass scale with the electric light playing on it. Stop and consider that our sub had only to get a downward inclination of ever so little while running hooked-up under water, and in no time she would be below her lowest safety depth of 200 feet, where the pressure is 7 tons to every square foot of her hull. And should she collapse there would be no preliminary small leak by way of warning. She would go as an egg-shell goes when you crush it in your palm. Plack!--like that--and it would be all over. Above this same middle compartment, the smallest and most crowded of all, up through the grilled spaces of a steel grating, we could see the wide feet and boot-legs of the man who held the ship to her compass course; and for a wheel, we knew, he was holding a little metal lever about as long and thick as his middle finger, with a little black ball about as big as the ball of his thumb on the end of it.

To the right of the foot of the conning-tower ladder stood the ballast-tank man; and when the captain from the foot of his periscope gave the word--after first looking forward, aft, and to each side of him to see that all hands were at their proper stations--it was the ballast-tank man who went violently at once into action. He grabbed a big valve and gave it a twist; grabbed another and gave it a twist; and another, and one more; and, standing near by, we could hear--or thought we could--the in-rush of great waters.

A man got to wondering then what would happen if this chap got his valves mixed. But a look around showed every lever and every valve, everything marked with its own name and number. Nothing was left unmarked--in deep-cut black lettering on brass plates generally, but here and there colored-light signs, too. After another look at the multiplicity of them, almost any man would agree that it is a good scheme.

But to get back: the tank man has done his part and our sub is sinking. There is no unusual feeling to inform a man she is sinking. Only for the starting of the engines, the diving-rudder man getting busy, and the wide-faced gauge's long green finger beginning to walk around, a man who didn't know could easily believe that the sub was still tied up alongside her supply-ship. But the long green finger is walking, and marking 5 feet, 10 feet, 11, 12, as it walks. At 16 feet the finger oscillates and stops, and to that depth our diving-rudder man holds her while she speeds on for a mile or so.

That first little dash is by way of warming her up. The officer for whose government this submarine was built is aboard. He now asks for a torpedo demonstration. So two 1,500-pound dummy torpedoes are got ready, the breeches to two of the four forward tubes opened, the torpedoes slipped in, the breeches closed. The bow caps are then opened.

The captain, during all this time, has never left the periscope, which--to have it explained and over with--is no more than a long telescope set on end, with a reflecting mirror top and bottom. From the lower end of the periscope project two brass arms, by means of which the skipper now swings the periscope all the way around. In this way he is able to look at any quarter of the sea he pleases.

Running at the depth we were then, the periscope showing about six feet out of water, the captain at the periscope was, of course, the only man who could see anything outside of her.

The captain gave the needful preliminary orders; and at the proper time, sighting through the periscope as he did so, he pressed the button of a little arrangement which he held, half concealed, in the palm of his hand. There was a soft explosion, a sort of woof!--and a torpedo was on the way to a hypothetical enemy, with only the captain able to see that it reached its mark.

As the torpedo left the sub the rudder man gave her a "down" rudder, which was to offset the tendency of the sub to shoot her nose to the surface; when the torpedo had gone the tank man turned on the air-pressure, which blew out what water had entered the torpedo chamber. By and by the other torpedo was fired.

One reason for this trial run was to prove that she could run so many miles an hour under water by the power of her storage-batteries alone. And soon she went at that. And no mild racket inside her then; for a sub's engine power and space are out of all proportion to her tonnage. Not to decrease the noise, the man to whom the trial meant most was standing by with a stop-watch, and every half-minute or so he would yell at the top of his lungs, "Go!" or "Hold!" to the engineer, who was imprisoned in a narrow alleyway with engines to right and to left and below him. The engineer would look at a register and yell back at the manager, who would then set some figures in a book and rush over to the man who was reckoning up the decreasing or increasing amperes or kilowatts or whatever they were of her storage-batteries, and set down more figures; and if the boss had to yell his head off to make himself heard, be sure that the others had to yell even louder. Only on trial trips, probably, where tests have to be proved, does all this yelling happen; but the total effect was to make a shore-goer feel, not as if he were in a ship under water, but rather in a subway section under construction, or some overdriven corner of some sort of night-working machine-shop, or some other homelike place ashore. The bright electric lights helped out the machine-shop illusion.

For a time during the run the diving-rudder man had his troubles keeping her on a level, whereupon the skipper--an easy-going man ordinarily--jerked his head away from his periscope and had a peek for the reason. Through the forward bulkhead door he spied the torpedo man, who, feeling pleased, perhaps, at the successful execution of his part of the programme, was fox-trotting fore and aft for himself in his section of the ship. "Would you mind picking out one spot and staying on it?" asked the skipper, at which the torpedo man took his camp-stool, picked out his one spot, and planted himself on it, and piously read the stock-market quotations of a week-old newspaper for the rest of the run.

While this hour run--full speed, submerged--was in progress, a tickling in our throats set most of us to coughing. A naval constructor of note, who was also a shark on chemistry, explained how this coughing was not caused by the chill in the air, but by the particles of sulphuric acid thrown off by the action of the storage-batteries. These little particles, it seems, went travelling about in the air seeking a home--some place, any place where they could tuck in out of the way; but all the air homes being already occupied by other tenants--the usual ingredients or components of the air--they could find no place to butt in; and so they went around and about till innocent people like ourselves made a home for them by breathing them in out of the way. After which explanation--yelled above all the other noises--these sulphuric hoboes caused less suspicion and discomfort. It was good to hear that what we were swallowing was not the chlorine of a hundred stories of fiction.