"This," said the captain, "is the control room. Notice the two depth gauges, two in case one gets out of order. That thick tube with a brass thread coiled about it is a periscope, and it's a peach! It's of the 'housing' kind and winds up and down along that screw. The thread prevents any leak of water. In here," we went through a lateral compartment with a steel door, thick as that of a small safe, "is a space where wee eat, sleep and live; our cook stove is that gadget in the corner. We don't do much cooking when we're running submerged; in here," we passed another stout partition, "is our Diesel engine, and our dynamos. Up forward is another living space which technically belongs to the officers, and the torpedo room." He took me along. "Now you've seen it all. A fat steel cigar, divided into various compartments and cram jammed full of shining machinery. Of course, there's no privacy, whatsoever. (Readers will have to guess what is occasionally used for the phonograph table.) Our space is so limited that designers will spend a year arguing where to put an object no bigger than a soap box. We get on very well however. Every crew gets used to its boat; the men get used to each other. They like the life; you couldn't drag them back to surface vessels. An ideal submarine crew works like a perfect machine. When we go out you'll see that we give our orders by Klaxon. There's too much noise for the voice. Suppose I had popped up on the surface right under the very nose of one of those destroyer brutes. She might start to ram me; in which case I might not have time to make recognition signals and would have to take my choice between getting rammed or depth bombed. I decide to submerge, push a button, the Klaxon gives a yell, and every man does automatically what he has been trained to do. A floods the tanks, B stands by the dynamos, C watches the depth gauges and so on. That's what we call a crash dive." "Over at the destroyer base," I said, "they told me that the Germans were having trouble because of lack of trained crews." "You can just bet they are," said the captain. "Must have lost several boats that way. Can't monkey with these boats; if somebody pulls a fool stunt--Good Night!" He opened a gold watch and closed it again with a click. "Nine o'clock, just time to shove off. Come up on the bridge until we get out in the bay."