stroyers, berths which, when not in use, can be closed very much after
the manner of a folding bed. When "submarined" crews are rescued the
sailors willingly give up their comfortable berths and do everything
else in their power to make the shipwrecked mariners comfortable. The
men receive their mail from home uncensored. It arrives about every ten
days in bags sealed in the United States. Their own letters, however,
are censored, not only by an officer aboard ship, but by a British
censor. However, there has been little or no complaint by the men on the
ground of being unable to say what they wish to their loved ones.

"The men," wrote an officer recently, "look upon submarine-hunting as a
great game. The only time they are discontented is when a situation
which looks like an approaching fight resolves itself into nothing. The
seas of the war zone are, of course, filled with all sorts of flotsam
and jetsam, and very often that which appears to be a periscope is
nothing of the sort. But when a real one comes--then the men accept it
as a reward."

In view of all that has been said thus far and remains to be said
concerning the submarine, it might be well to digress for a moment and
devote the remainder of this chapter to a consideration of the undersea
fighter, its genesis, what it now is, and what it has accomplished. We
all know that the submarine was given to the world by an American
inventor--that is to say, the submarine in very much the form that we
know it to-day, the effective, practical submarine. The writer recalls
witnessing experiments more than twenty years ago on the Holland
submarine--the first modern submarine type--and he recalls how closely
it was guarded in the early days of 1898, when it lay at Elizabethport
and the Spanish war-ship _Viscaya_, Captain Eulate, lay in our harbor.
This was a month or so after the destruction of the battleship _Maine_
in Havana Harbor, and threats against the Spanish had led, among other
precautions, to an armed guard about the _Holland_ lest some excitable
person take her out and do damage to the _Viscaya_. There was no real
danger, of course, that this would happen; it merely tends to show the
state of public mind.

Well, in any event, the _Holland_, and improved undersea craft
subsequently developed, converted the seemingly impossible into the
actual. To an Englishman, William Bourne, a seaman-gunner must be
credited the first concrete exposition of the possibilities