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 lifeboat, 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!”

[Sidenote:  The submarines are moved alongside.]

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 gray 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 strange, incomprehensible, and out of place in the motion of the storm.

And then 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.

[Sidenote:  Submarines are going out to-night.]

“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.  Branch 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 aren’t our subs sometimes mistaken for Germans?”