more surprising the speed with which a submarine
can come to the surface, the men get out on deck, fire the gun,
get in again and the vessel once more submerges.

I was in the first boatload that went over to the submarine. From
a distance it looked like nothing so much as a rather long piece
of 4x8 floating on the water, with another block set on top of it
and a length of lath nailed on the block. It lost none of these
characteristics as we neared it. It only gained a couple of ropes
along the sides of the 4x8, while men kept coming mysteriously
out of the block until a round dozen was waiting to receive us.
The really surprising thing was that the men turned out to be
perfectly good French sailors, with a most exceedingly polite
French lieutenant to help us aboard the little craft....

[Illustration: _The Capture of a U-Boat._

_Painting by John E. Whiting._]

The vessel we were in was a 500-ton cruising submarine. It had
just come from eight months' guarding the Channel, and showed all
the battering of eight months of a very rough and stormy career
with no time for a lie-up for repairs. It was interesting to see
the commander hand the depth gauge a wallop to start it working
and find out if the centre of the boat was really nine feet
higher than either end. We were fifty-four feet under water and
diving when the commander performed that little experiment and we
continued to dive while the gauge spun around and finally stopped
at a place which indicated approximately that our back was not
broken. I suppose that was one of the things my friend the
lieutenant referred to when he said life on a submarine was such
a sporting proposition.

We boarded the submarine over the tail end and balanced our way
up the long narrow block, like walking a tight rope, to the
turret, where we descended through a hole like the opening into a
gas main into a small round compartment about six feet in
diameter exactly in the midship section, which was the largest
compartment in the ship. Running each way from it the length of
the vessel were long corridors, some two feet wide. On each side
of the corridors were rows of tiny compartments, which were the
living and working rooms of the ship. Naturally, most of the
space was given up to the working rooms.

The