"Quite. I was only trying to prove you were a book-worm."
"What was the book?" enquired Sir William.
"Oh, Meredith, sir. Richard something-or-another. Topping yarn."
The guest steered the conversation out of literary channels.
"Were you over the other side much?" he asked blandly.
"Pretty well all the war, till we came up North," was the Lieutenant-Commander's reply. "You'll have to use the same knife for the butter; hope you don't mind. We get into piggish ways here, I'm afraid…. Amusin' work at times, but nothing to the Dardanelles; we never got out there, though; spent all our time nuzzling sandbanks off the Ems and thereabouts. Of course, one sees more of Fritz in that way, but I can't say it exactly heightens one's opinion of him. We used to think at the beginning of the war that Fritz was a sportsman—for a German, you know. But he's really just a dirty dog taking very kindly to the teaching of bigger and dirtier dogs than himself."
Sir William pondered this intelligence. "That's the generally accepted theory," he said.
"They may have had some white men in their submarines at one time, but we've either downed them or they've got Prussianised. They've disgraced the very word submarine to all eternity." The speaker shook his head over the besmirched escutcheon of his young profession.
"They're cowards, all right," added the Lieutenant. "'Member that
Fritz we chased all the way to Heligoland on the surface?"
"Yep. Signalled to him with a flashing lamp to stop and fight: called him every dirty name we could lay our tongues on. Think he'd turn and have it out? Not much! … Yet he had the bigger gun and the higher speed. Signalled back, 'Not to-day, thank you!' and legged it inside gun-range of the forts. Phew! That made us pretty hot, didn't it, Sub?"