Another moonlight picture presented itself. A boat-load of terrorised Finns rising and falling on the swell alongside the Submarine, and, half a mile away, an abandoned sailing ship with every rope and spar standing out black against the moonlight. In the stern of the boat stood a mighty Norwegian with a red beard and a voice like a bull. One of his arms rested protectingly round a woman's shoulders, and he shook a knotted fist in von Sperrgebiet's face as his ship blew up and sank.
The woman seen thus in the pale moonlight was young and pretty, and the red-bearded man bellowed that she was his wife. The announcement was not an unfamiliar one to Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet: they usually were young and pretty when he heard that hot rage in a man's voice. Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet made himself scarce forthwith, it might be almost said, from force of habit….
The glass was falling, and it was in mid-Atlantic that they left that boat. It blew a gale next day, and the Oberleutnant, who had an eye for a pretty woman, sometimes wondered if the boat was picked up.
His mind revolved for a moment round certain incidents in connection with that affair. A German sailor from the Submarine had been sent onboard to place the bombs; he returned with cigars, a ham, and a pretty silver clock. Also a box of sugar plums, half finished.
Von Sperrgebiet took the clock and the sugar plums. The cigars and the ham (the labourer being worthy of his hire) he allowed the sailor to keep.
But even Submarine warfare against unarmed shipping has its risks. There was the ever-memorable incident of the British tug, and even now von Sperrgebiet winced at the recollection. They had sighted a sailing ship in tow of a tug at the entrance to the Channel; von Sperrgebiet was proud of his mastery of the English tongue, and it was this small vanity that led him to adopt tactics which differed somewhat from his normal caution. He submerged until within a couple of hundred yards of the approaching tow and then rose to the surface, dripping, like some uncouth sea-monster. Armed with a revolver and a megaphone, and with pleasurable anticipation in his heart, the Oberleutnant emerged from the conning-tower with a view to a little preliminary banter with these detested and unarmed English before administering a coup de grace. He was just in time to see a stout, ungainly man tumbling aft along the deck from the wheel-house of the tug. Raising a booted leg with surprising agility, the stout man kicked off the shackle of the tow rope, and as he did so over went the helm; the blunt-nosed tug, released from her 3,000-ton burden, came straight for him like an angry buffalo.
They were not forty yards apart when the tug turned, and quick as the German coxswain was, the Submarine failed to avoid the stunning impact of the bows. A revolver bullet crashed through the glass window of the wheel-house; von Sperrgebiet had an instant's vision of a round face, purple with rage, above the spokes of the wheel, and then the conning tower's automatic hatchway closed. The Submarine was in diving trim, and she submerged in the shortest time on record. They remained on the bottom four hours while the sweating mechanics repaired the damaged hydroplane gear and effected some temporary caulking round certain plates that bulged ominously.
But von Sperrgebiet's hatred of England was real enough before this incident. He had always hated the English, even in his youth when for a year he occupied an inconspicuous niche in one of the less fastidious Public Schools. He hated them for the qualities he despised and found so utterly inexplicable. He despised their lazy contempt for detail, their quixotic sense of fairness and justice in a losing game, their persistent refusal to be impressed by the seriousness of anything on earth. He despised their whole-hearted passion for sports at an age when he was beginning to be interested in less wholesome and far more complex absorptions…. He despised their straight, clean affections and quarrels and their tortuous sense of humour; the affectation that led them to take cold baths instead of hot ones: their shy, rather knightly mental attitude towards their sisters and one another's sisters….
All these things von Sperrgebiet despised in the English. But he also hated them for something he had never even admitted to himself. Crudely put, it was because he knew that he could never beat an Englishman. There was nothing in his spirit that could outlast the terrible, emotionless determination in the English character to win.
Von Sperrgebiet's reflections came to an end with his cigarette. He tossed the stump overboard, and raising a pair of glasses he focused them intently on the horizon to the eastward.