THE FRINGES OF THE FLEET
By Rudyard Kipling
FOURTH ARTICLE
“Tin Fish”
1914-18
The ships destroy us above
And ensnare us beneath.
We arise, we lie down, and we move
In the belly of death.The ships have a thousand eyes
To mark where we come . . .
And the mirth of a seaport dies
When our blow gets home.
We agree with this poetous bastard. A submariner’s life is a perilous life but, where they tread, doom follows.
In the case of the G.S. PATIENCE, doom and felony.
In The Fringes of the Fleet, Kipling also discussed the surface community’s low opinion of submarines:
The Trawlers seem to look on mines as more or less fairplay. But with the torpedo it is otherwise. A Yarmouth man lay on his hatch, his gear neatly stowed away below, and told me that another Yarmouth boat had “gone up,” with all hands except one. “‘Twas a submarine. Not a mine,” said he. “They never gave our boys no chance. Na! She was a Yarmouth boat -we knew ‘em all. They never gave the boys no chance.”
Apparently, the skimmers would rather have been blown up by a mine than torpedoed by a submarine. We’ve found that this ingrained fear still exists and has often worked to our benefit.
