However often one meets it, as in this war one meets it at every turn,
one never gets used to the Holy Spirit of Man at his job. The "common
sweeper," growling over his mug of tea that there was "nothing in
sweepin'," and these idly chaffing men, new shaved and attired, from
the gates of Death which had let them through for the fiftieth time,
were all of the same fabric--incomprehensible, I should imagine, to
the enemy. And the stuff held good throughout all the world--from the
Dardanelles to the Baltic, where only a little while ago another batch
of submarines had slipped in and begun to be busy. I had spent some of
the afternoon in looking through reports of submarine work in the Sea
of Marmora. They read like the diary of energetic weasels in an
overcrowded chicken-run, and the results for each boat were tabulated
something like a cricket score. There were no maiden overs. One came
across jewels of price set in the flat official phraseology. For
example, one man who was describing some steps he was taking to remedy
certain defects, interjected casually: "At this point I had to go
under for a little, as a man in a boat was trying to grab my periscope
with his hand." No reference before or after to the said man or his
fate. Again: "Came across a dhow with a Turkish skipper. He seemed so
miserable that I let him go." And elsewhere in those waters, a
submarine overhauled a steamer full of Turkish passengers, some of
whom, arguing on their allies' lines, promptly leaped overboard. Our
boat fished them out and returned them, for she was not killing
civilians. In another affair, which included several ships (now at the
bottom) and one submarine, the commander relaxes enough to note that:
"The men behaved very well under direct and flanking fire from rifles
at about fifteen yards." This was _not_, I believe, the submarine that
fought the Turkish cavalry on the beach. And in addition to matters
much more marvellous than any I have hinted at, the reports deal with
repairs and shifts and contrivances carried through in the face of
dangers that read like the last delirium of romance. One boat went
down the Straits and found herself rather canted over to one side. A
mine and chain had jammed under her forward diving-plane. So far as I
made out, she shook it off by standing on her head and jerking
backwards; or it may have been, for the thing has occurred more than
once, she merely rose as much as she could, when she could, and then
"released it by hand," as the official phrase goes.