Our Navy at Work Author:Reginald Wright Kauffman Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PERILS OF THE DEEP I FIRST sailed with the Suicide Fleet in the early autumn of 1917, and most of the incidents I have thus far recorded occurr... more »ed either before or shortly after that time. Those were the days when the harlequin-yachts had but one chance of safety: "It's this way," I remember a volunteer of forty- two explained the matter: "A sub's torpedo costs about $25,000, and our boats have been so knocked about by this time that their marked value isn't more than $15,000 apiece. Of course, once in a while we do so much damage that Fritzie loses his temper and thinks we're worth a tin-fish. If he ever hits us, it's good night: we're so little and we carry such a lot of explosives that we'd never know what struck us. That's the way it was with the Alcedo. I was aboard her." He told me about the Alcedo. I repeat his words, as nearly as possible, verbatim: "It was night, and winter, and cold. We was bringin' up the tail of a convoy. I was below, asleep in my bunk. All of a sudden—BANG! "I didn't need to be told what that was. I was out of my bunk and at the door before the explosion was over—mebbie the explosion threw me out. "Something had happened to the lights, and everything was pitch dark. I grabbed the doorknob—and the door had jammed. "Don't ask me how I got that door open. I don't know. I remember jerkin' down a bunk and hammering at the door with the bunk's iron framework, and then, the next thing I remember, I was on deck. "The way the men that was on duty behaved, you can tell that best from one story. We had a gob named Proon—something like that. He was one of the forward gun-crew and was at his station when the torpedo struck us. Nobody'd seen her coming. Nobody knew there was a sub anywhere near. We just all of a sudden got it. ...« less