“Excitement may sustain them; they may figure it out that their chances of life and death are on a par with those of the soldier in a frontal attack, but it is at least doubtful. It is difficult to make the analogy; and, moreover, there is the chill of the water to consider. Nerves and courage both suffer from cold, and the interior of a submarine has always the chill of a tomb. Inside it men sit, and may not move without endangering the craft’s stability. It will need a high courage thus to sit absolutely without means of knowing whether a painful annihilation is coming in a few minutes; it will certainly render it difficult to take careful observations—and careful observations are a vital necessity. And the Frenchman, of all races of men, seems least fitted to be calm under such circumstances. It must further be remembered that if a destroyer is within a thousand yards she will be easily able to steam up and destroy the boat, for a thousand yards a minute is now destroyer speed. The boat, on the other hand, cannot, save under favourable circumstances, see a distance of a thousand yards, certainly not in a hasty rise and plunge again. She might just distinguish a big ship, but that is about all. On the verge of a frightful death it will take a very cool man even to see that.”[7] Footnote 7: “Our preparations for attacking submarines with spar torpedoes fitted to torpedo-boats or destroyers are exciting the ridicule of those foreign nations which from experience know what submarines are like. We claim that our specially rigged spar-torpedo can reach a submarine at a depth of 10 feet below the surface, but why a submarine should run at 10 instead of 30 or 40 feet does not appear. The truth seems to be that if the submarine can be reached at all by the spar-torpedo she could, at least in the vast majority of cases, be reached much more expeditiously and certainly by means of the gun” (W. LAIRD CLOWES, at Institution of Naval Architects, 1902). The French appear to have considered the possibility of some “antidote,” for the submersible _Narval_ has a double hull, and in the space between the two, sea water is allowed to circulate freely. Whether this device will enable the boat to resist the force of an explosion is a question which can only be satisfactorily decided in actual warfare. Meanwhile the bomb-proof hull will certainly receive attention. So far the periscope and the optical tube have not done away with the necessity for the submarine to come to the surface to correct her course and take her bearings, but there are those who claim that even if the necessity were removed, the whereabouts of the submarine would be revealed by tell-tale foam and bubbles.