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Updated: June 19, 2025
While all the vast square, and all the windows and roofs even of the houses over against the palace, were alive with an innumerable sea of troubled raging faces, showing white, upturned from the under-sea of their many-coloured raiment; the murmur from them was like the sough of the first tempest-wind among the pines, and the gleam of spears here and there like the last few gleams of the sun through the woods when the black thunder-clouds come up over all, soon to be shone through, those woods, by the gleam of the deep lightning.
"You ought to know there are no German battleships here," he said. "But " began Frank. "The battleships are still safely bottled up in Heligoland," Jack explained. "While Ostend is called a German naval base, it is, strictly speaking, nothing but a submarine base. The under-sea boats have been able to run in here without much difficulty, but the larger vessels could hardly get by on the surface."
It is the same thrill which the wilting west wind steeps from the salt marsh as it comes across, some baffling and alluring ether distilled from under-sea caverns where cool green mermen tend emerald fires.
"That had seemed to be the object of the German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since April of last year the imperial Government had somewhat restrained the commanders of its under-sea craft, in conformity with its promise then given to us that passenger boats should not be sunk, and that due warning would be given to all other vessels which its submarines might seek to destroy, when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that their crews were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in their open boats.
Do you suppose there is a terrible roar of wind and wave that bangs us against each other at such times, and makes of the under-sea a raging bedlam? Oh, by no means! There is nothing of the kind down in what Folks call "the lower ocean." It is calm and quiet as the surface of a pond on a pleasant summer day.
It was possible to operate the M. N. 1 from three positions, but Tom wanted no triplicate handling of his craft now. Almost the instant Tom signaled that he would take charge back came flashing the electrical signal from the conning tower that his orders were understood. The next thing that those aboard the craft became aware of was a tremor that seemed to run through the whole under-sea ship.
The captain shot a look at the gyroscopic compass and gave orders for the motors to go ahead, and for half an hour the submarine pushed about under the surface. Then the commander had the periscope raised, and on the distant horizon I made out the destroyer a tiny thing even in the glass of the magnifying lens of the under-sea boat's "eye."
And, so far as the British public knew, England had taken no steps to combat this under-sea peril. However, as Lord Hastings had told the boys at the opening of this story, Great Britain had taken such steps, and that they were effective was evident from his additional statement that in the neighborhood of a hundred submarines had "vanished."
The wind was blowing about 30 knots when I boarded the mother ship of the submarines in the English East Coast port. It was an unsettled sort of morning, and just after I had walked over two narrow planks to the under-sea craft, aboard which I was to make a cruise under the North Sea, the sun shot forth a widening streak of blurred silver like a searchlight on the prancing green-grey waves.
The two enemy under-sea boats last in line had turned about with the first warning and were making full speed down river again. The rest had submerged before the British could come upon them and had sought to come about and make their way to safety beneath the water. But the British vessels were too swift for them.
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