The other nightmare arose out of silence and imagination.  A boat had gone to bed on the bottom in a spot where she might reasonably expect to be looked for, but it was a convenient jumping-off, or up, place for the work in hand.  About the bad hour of 2.30 A.M. the commander was waked by one of his men, who whispered to him:  “They’ve got the chains on us, sir!” Whether it was pure nightmare, an hallucination of long wakefulness, something relaxing and releasing in that packed box of machinery, or the disgustful reality, the commander could not tell, but it had all the makings of panic in it.  So the Lord and long training put it into his head to reply!  “Have they?  Well, we shan’t be coming up till nine o’clock this morning.  Well see about it then.  Turn out that light, please.”

He did not sleep, but the dreamer and the others did, and when morning came and he gave the order to rise, and she rose unhampered, and he saw the grey, smeared seas from above once again, he said it was a very refreshing sight.

Lastly, which is on all fours with the gamble of the chase, a man was coming home rather bored after an uneventful trip.  It was necessary for him to sit on the bottom for awhile, and there he played patience.  Of a sudden it struck him, as a vow and an omen, that if he worked out the next game correctly he would go up and strafe something.  The cards fell all in order.  He went up at once and found himself alongside a German, whom, as he had promised and prophesied to himself, he destroyed.  She was a mine-layer, and needed only a jar to dissipate like a cracked electric-light bulb.  He was somewhat impressed by the contrast between the single-handed game fifty feet below, the ascent, the attack, the amazing result, and when he descended again, his cards just as he had left them.

    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 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.