World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Turkey -- Gallipoli Peninsula
In the evening, Williams and Phillips and myself borrow a boat from
an M.L.O. and have a short row round. It makes splendid exercise, and
the scenes on shore are very interesting. Why did not we think of it
before? When they shell the beach, all we have to do is to get into a
boat and row out to sea, and then watch the fun. Surely a submarine
would not trouble to torpedo us, and it would be a shell with our name
and address on that would hit us. We pass a submarine—British—marked
B9, a very small one. An officer is in the conning tower and says “Good
evening” to us. We chat, and he invites us on board. Two sailors hold
our little boat while we clumsily climb on to the submarine’s slippery
back. We climb down a perpendicular iron ladder through a hole not much
larger than a coal-shoot to a cellar under a street. Inside we find
only one chamber, awfully cramped and small. At one end of this sleep
the men, and at the other two officers. The chamber provides quarters
for men and officers alike, and engine-room, ward-room, and ante-room,
all in one, like Dan Leno’s one-roomed house. In Dan Leno’s words,
“If you want to go into the drawing-room—you stay where you are!” I
am shown the working of the engines, and try to look wisely at the
intricate host of levers and brass things, but really can understand
nothing at all of what the officer is talking about. I am shown how a
torpedo is fired. You pull a thing out and she shoots. Phillips appears
to know all about it though, but he doesn’t really. I look through the
periscope, turn the lens round, and suddenly before my eyes I see “V”
Beach and Sed-el-Bahr in vivid detail. What joy it must be to spot a
Hun battleship and see her effectively hit!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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