_Told by Emile Vedel in L'Illustration, Paris_
Many a novelist and some dramatists have tried to imagine the last
agonies of the crew of a submarine boat that has received a mortal
wound and sunk. Here is a first-hand account of the dreadful reality,
told by men who actually experienced the tragedy. How these men
slipped out from the very jaws of death just as they were closing
on them, even they cannot fully explain; but some strange freak of
the machinery made their submarine bob back to the surface after
the water pouring into it had sent the vessel down 200 feet. Emile
Vedel, who is writing the story of the French naval operations in the
Adriatic and publishing it serially, under governmental authority in
_L'Illustration_, obtained the facts from the signed statements of
two petty officers of the boat. Translated by Arthur Benington in the
_New York World_. Copyright, 1917, Press Publishing Company.