*Part III Summer 1916 to Spring 1917* Wutki

The boat is being overhauled. It is a messy job. Anything that can be removed comes off. Then the battery generators come out, are emptied and cleaned. The inside of the boat looks like it is being wrecked. The paint is scraped off and on the board walls, the rust is removed with steel brushes. But the best job is yet to come. That is the cleaning of the tanks. In the dive tanks it is not so bad. In there you can move around a little. But the regulator tanks, that is another matter. There you can hardly squeeze through the small manhole. And after you are inside you have all the ribs on the sides to cope with and you feel like you are encased in an iron casket. It is bad enough just to lie in there with little room to move your hands, but the dust from scraping the rust makes it a real martyrdom. Every quarter hour another man has to crawl in.

Finally after a few days the scratching comes to an end. But now the real work begins. The tanks have to be brushed with "minium" paint prepared with alcohol to keep the rust from attacking soon again. Thus, in we go. While it was before necessary to relieve a man every fifteen minutes, it was now every ten. A fan was also used inside to constantly replace the alcohol-saturated air with fresh air. Besides that, another man had to be on watch in case a painter became ill so he could be extracted right away. The first one had to be taken out after only five minutes already. He was totally drunk from the alcohol fumes.

For this reconditioning work we were also assigned some Russian prisoners of war. At first they did not want to go in, they were afraid. At the camp they were told that for the slightest cause we would beat and mistreat them. But when they received good food and good treatment from us they willingly and gladly performed any work that was given to them. Except, when we pulled the first unconscious man out of the tank, they hesitated. Neither threatening nor coaxing helped.

We were all the more surprised when a new prisoner came along a few days later who crawled into the tank without a question. And then he did not want to come out again. To the question from the interpreter that his time was up and didn't he want to be relieved, he just said calmly that he was not drunk yet. After a good quarter hour he came out with shiny eyes and mentioned that he could not understand why the others did not want to go in. Then he talke to his comrades and now the ban was broken. Where before, nobody wanted to go in, now they could not wait for their turn. It was puzzling for us.

To our question, why they refused before and now were so excited about going into the tank, they only answered evasively that they were afraid before. To the inquiry of what they were afraid of, they only shrugged their shoulders. We didn't care too much. The important thing being the fact that we didn't have to go in anymore. It was strange though that so much paint was being used while the work was progressing so slowly.

Now we watched a little closer and soon found out the reason why they were so eager. When Drzmicek one time looked unexpectedly inside the tank he noticed the man taking a good swallow out of the paint pot. He was removed from the tank with his mouth and teeth all red. When we asked him about the poison he said with a smiling face, "Wutki dobro!" (Vodka good!)

With the Russians out we had to submit to that task again.