“The supreme risk had to be taken of cutting a big hole through the
outer and inner skins. If when it was cut the hawsers parted, or _K-13_
by burying her stern still more deeply escaped from their embrace, all
would be over. The men remaining in the vessel, forty-nine of them,
would follow into the shades their dead messmates whose bodies lay in
the boiler and engine rooms. But whatever the risk the hole had to be
cut, and that quickly.
“Inside the submarine, hope, which may have flickered a little when
the air-tube was first opened, had given place to the old dull apathy.
Food and drink had been passed down the tube, but appetite for them
had vanished. They struggled mechanically, as trained British seamen
always will so long as life is in them; they struggled mechanically
like automata against the incoming water. It was difficult to move
about upon the most urgent duties. The wet and slippery floor of the
control room lay now on a long upward slant upon which the half-dazed
seamen stumbled and fell. There was no lack of courage; no one grumbled
or lamented; but frail human bodies have their limits of endurance, and
those limits had been reached.
“Yet the men worked on and did their utmost to carry out the directions
of those who led them. The place where the hole was about to be cut
lay far towards the bows, and to reach it from within the fore bulkhead
must be opened. But when it was sought to unclose the bulkhead which
divided the control room from the foc’sle, it was found that the door
had jammed and would not slide back. For hours this miserable shut
door stood between these men and freedom. Somehow at last it was
got open, but no one has clearly told me how. It was not until the
survivors of _K-13_ had for a long time been above water that they
became voluble—and untrustworthy. At the moment of rescue, or shortly
afterwards, they remembered as little as one on awakening in the
morning remembers the details of a dream. Yet they remembered that
door, how it stood there obdurate for hours and at last yielded. Though
how it had stuck or why it yielded they could not say.
“A DEVIL OF A LOT OF WATER”
“Meanwhile the hole in the bows was being cut, and the cutting of this
holes supplies me with one pleasing bit of comedy with which to round
off this rather grim story. Any acetylene plant makes butter of steel
plates, and it was very rapid work to draw the spouting white flame,
fed from the _Ranger’s_ plant, round a rough circle marked out on
_K-13’s_ bows. The outer skin was quickly cut through. Within lay water
filling up the space honeycombed with cross ties between the inner and
outer skins. Before the inner hole could be cut, this water must be
pumped out. The place selected for the hole could not be reached by
the steam salvage pumps, so the men working upon the submarine’s hull
were compelled to fit gear for pumping the water out by hand. They knew
that it was no more than five feet deep, so they bent their backs to
it cheerfully. But they were less cheerful when they found that their
efforts produced no appreciable result. ‘There must be a devil of a lot
of water between these skins,’ said they, and bent to the task once
more. Shift followed shift, and the pumping went on. It was a tiresome,
backwearying business, but precious lives were at stake, and they would
get that water down and the inner hole cut if they died of disgust in
the doing of it. But the water showed no sign of going down. How long
this pumping went on I cannot say with precision. Admittedly it was
hours, probably as many hours as it took to pry open that obtrusive
bulkhead door, for some of the survivors of _K-13_ had got through
their job and arrived under the pumpers’ feet while they were still
pumping.
“It then occurred to the slaves of the hand-pump to seek after
enlightenment from those whom they were pumping to save. ‘How long is
it going to take,’ asked they, ‘to get rid of this damned water between
the skins?’ They were asked by one of Fairfields’s experts how long
they had been pumping. The reply was ‘Hours.’ ‘Have you closed the flap
valves?’ dryly asked the man of Fairfields. They hadn’t; the water was
coming in just as fast as they pumped it out; they had been trying with
hand-gear to pump out the ocean!