“Meanwhile Fairfields in Glasgow were hard at work. A special staff
of draughtsmen and mechanics were put on to the construction of two
flexible tubes, one designed for the passage of air and food, and
the other for bringing up the men one by one, if no other and better
means was found to be possible. The first tube, in comparison with
the second, was easy of construction. It was seven inches in diameter
and fitted with a screw union to connect with the circular ammunition
hoist beside one of the deck guns of _K-13_. The other, built of steel
sections, was designed to fit tightly over the torpedo hatch by means
of a connecting frame. The first was the more immediately urgent, for
until it was completed and fixed in place the survivors in the sunken
submarine must remain coffined. Both were put in hand long before
communication had been established between the salvors and _K-13_,
and here one sees how completely the lives of all the imprisoned men
depended upon Fairfields’s exact knowledge. Both tubes would have been
useless unless their dimensions had been precisely correct. There
was no need to press Fairfields’s workmen not to waste a moment; by
night as well as by day they threw into their pious task every ounce
of energy and every refinement of skill which they possessed. To lay
hand to the work was an honor for which all eagerly competed. Though
both tubes were completed in an astonishingly short time, and the first
proved to be invaluable, the efficiency of the second—the man-saver—was
not tested. Other means were successfully employed to get the men out.
But this does not detract in any way from the merits of its design
and of its rapid accomplishment. Battles may be won without calling
upon the reserves, but he would be a very poor general who had not the
reserves ready, if need be, at his call.
“For the time being the salvage party could do little except to send
divers down and to open up communications with the men whom they had
come to save. Until the first tube, which I have just described, was
ready to their hands, they could take few active measures. The vessels
and plant at Barttelot’s disposal were quite incapable of raising the
great hull which lay below them, and the famous Ranger, for which he
had telegraphed to Liverpool, could not arrive till the following
day. The Ranger, owned by the Liverpool Salvage Association, had been
requisitioned by the Admiralty early in the war, and had proved as
powerfully effective in war as she had been in peace. She is worthy
of her name, for under Captain Young—the most accomplished of living
salvage officers—she has ranged over the world, picking up wrecks a
dozen times her size with an ease which looks almost miraculous.