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With the American Submarines: Night

Night and day are the same on a submarine.

Captain Bill of the Z-3 was out on patrol. His vessel was running submerged. The air within--they had but recently dived--was new and sweet; and that raw cold which eats into submerged submarines had not begun to take the joy out of life. It was the third day out; the time, five o'clock in the afternoon. The outer world, however, did not penetrate into the submarine. Night or day, on the surface or submerged, only one time, a kind of motionless electric high noon, existed within those concave walls of gleaming cream-white enamel. Those of the crew not on watch were taking it easy. Like unto their officers, submarine sailors are an unusual lot. They are real sailors, or machinist sailors--boys for whose quality the navy has a flattering, picturesque, and quite unprintable adjective. A submarine man, mind you, works harder than perhaps any other man of his grade in the navy, because the vessel in which he lives is nothing but a tremendously intricate machine. Life on board.

In one of the compartments the phonograph, the eternal, ubiquitous phonograph of the navy, was bawling its raucous rags and mechanonasal songs, and in the pauses between records, one could just hear the low hum of the distant dynamos. A little group in blue dungarees held a conversation in a corner; a petty officer, blue cap tilted back on his head, was at work on a letter; the cook, whose genial art was customarily under an interdict while the vessel was running submerged, was reading an ancient paper from his own home town. News of a German submarine.