dhem's, lead all the rest.

I do not know the exact line of demarcation between engine-room and
gunnery repairs, but I imagine it is faint and fluid. E11, for
example, while she was helping E14 to shell a beached steamer, smashed
half her gun-mounting, "the gun-layer being thrown overboard, and the
gun nearly following him." However, the mischief was repaired in the
next twenty-four hours, which, considering the very limited deck space
of a submarine, means that all hands must have been moderately busy.
One hopes that they had not to dive often during the job.

But worse is to come. E2 (Commander D. Stocks) carried an externally
mounted gun which, while she was diving up the Dardanelles on
business, got hung up in the wires and stays of a net. She saw them
through the conning-tower scuttles at a depth of 80 ft--one wire
hawser round the gun, another round the conning-tower, and so on.
There was a continuous crackling of small explosions overhead which
she thought were charges aimed at her by the guard-boats who watch the
nets. She considered her position for a while, backed, got up steam,
barged ahead, and shore through the whole affair in one wild surge.
Imagine the roof of a navigable cottage after it has snapped telegraph
lines with its chimney, and you will get a small idea of what happens
to the hull of a submarine when she uses her gun to break wire hawsers
with.

TROUBLE WITH A GUN

E2 was a wet, strained, and uncomfortable boat for the rest of her
cruise. She sank steamers, burned dhows; was worried by torpedo-boats
and hunted by Hun planes; hit bottom freely and frequently; silenced
forts that fired at her from lonely beaches; warned villages who might
have joined in the game that they had better keep to farming; shelled
railway lines and stations; would have shelled a pier, but found there
was a hospital built at one end of it, "so could not bombard"; came
upon dhows crowded with "female refugees" which she "allowed to
proceed," and was presented with fowls in return; but through it all
her chief preoccupation was that racked and strained gun and mounting.
When there was nothing else doing she reports sourly that she "worked
on gun." As a philosopher of the lower deck put it: "'Tisn't what you
blanky _do_ that matters, it's what you blanky _have_ to do." In other
words, worry, not work, kills.

E2's gun did its best to knock the heart out of them all. She had to
shift the wretched thing twice; once bec