“Still I think that I should have done it.”
“So should I. But Fritz didn’t. He roamed about the harbour, blind, keeping as deep down as he could safely go. Above him scoured the patrol boats and destroyers, and above them again flew the seaplanes. Now and then the air observers would get a sight of him and once or twice they dropped bombs, but this was soon stopped as the risk to our own boats was too great. Regarded as artillery practice bomb dropping from aeroplanes is simply rotten. One can’t possibly aim from a thing moving at fifty miles an hour. If one may believe the look outs of the destroyers the whole harbour crawled with periscopes, but they were really bully beef cans and other rubbish chucked over from the warships. When last seen, or believed to be seen, Fritz was blundering towards the line of battleships lying under the deep gloom of the shore, and then he vanished altogether. Night came on, the very long Northern night in winter, and it seemed extra specially long to us in the big ships. Searchlights were going all through the dark hours, the water gleamed, all the floating rubbish which accumulates so fast in harbour stood out dead black against the silvery surface, and the Officers of the Watch detected more periscopes than Fritz had in his whole service. The hunt went on without ceasing for, at any moment, Fritz’s batteries might peter out, and he come up. It was a bit squirmy to feel that here cooped up in a narrow deep sea lock were over a hundred King’s ships, and that somewhere below us was a desperate German submarine which couldn’t possibly escape, but which might blow some of us to blazes any minute.”
“Did any of you go to sleep?” asked the Pongo foolishly.
The Sub-Lieutenant stared. “When it wasn’t my watch I turned in as usual,” he replied. “Why not?
“In the morning there was no sign of Fritz, so we concluded that he had either sunk himself to the bottom or had somehow managed to get out of the harbour. In either case we should not see him more. So we just forgot him as we had forgotten others who had been chased and had escaped. But he turned up again after all. For twenty-four hours nothing much happened except the regular routine, though after the scare we were all very wide awake for more U boats, and then we had orders to proceed to sea. I was senior snotty of the Olympus, and I was on the after look-out platform as the ship cast loose from her moorings and moved away, to take her place in the line. As we got going there was a curious grating noise all along the bottom just as if we had been lightly aground; everyone was puzzled to account for it as there were heaps of water under us. The grating went on till we were clear of our berth, and then in the midst of the wide foaming wake rolled up the long thin hull of a submarine. A destroyer dashed up, and the forward gun was in the act of firing when a loud voice from her bridge called on the gunners to stop. ‘Don’t fire on a coffin,’ roared her commander. It was the German submarine, which after some thirty hours under water had become a dead hulk. All the air had long since been used up and the crew were lying at their posts—cold meat, poor devils. A beastly way to die.”
“Beastly,” murmured the Marine. “War is a foul game.”
“Still,” went on the Sub-Lieutenant, cheerfully, “a dead Fritz is always much more wholesome than a live one, and here were a score of him safely dead.”
“But what had happened to the submarine?” asked the Marine, not being a sailor.
“Don’t you see?” explained the Sub-Lieutenant, who had held his story to be artistically finished. “What a Pongo it is! Fritz had wandered about blind, deep down under water, until his batteries had given out. Then the submarine rose, fouled our bottom by the merest accident, and stuck there jammed against our bilge keels till the movement of the ship had thrown it clear. It swung to the tide with us. The chances against the submarine rising under one of the battleships were thousands to one, but chances like that have a way of coming off at sea. Nothing at sea ever causes surprise, my son.”
The Sub-Lieutenant spoke with the assurance of a grey-haired Admiral; he was barely twenty years old, but he was wise with the profound salt wisdom of the sea and will never get any older or less wise though he lives to be ninety.