But she was no longer heading west. She had turned tail. She was a Hamburg-Amerika liner converted to a transport, and thick black smoke poured out of her four funnels as she raced back towards Heligoland and safety.
"She's got nearly three thousand troops on board, I'll bet you a manhattan," Bernard said. "We must get her, we simply must!"
Turning to the west, we saw at least five destroyers rushing for us like express trains. Whether they had seen us come up or not I cannot tell, but they knew well enough what our manœuvre would be, and they were not a mile and a half away.
"Get down. Tell Bosustow to cram it all on. Increase the spark. We've got to do twenty knots if we scrap the whole thing."
I was there in a moment, I told Bosustow what the skipper had said. The big man was quietly chewing tobacco, and he spat down on the accumulators as he made a motion to salute. He moved like a slug over his roaring engines, but even as he did so, the angry hum, the muffled explosions, rose into a steel symphony like Tchaikovsky's "1812"! I felt the ship leap forward like a whippet out of leash. When I stumbled up on deck again, the wind was whistling all round the conning-tower. It blew my cap off into the sea.
We gained, we gained enormously, but so did the pursuing destroyers.
We soon knew that. There were sounds behind us like a little street-boy whistling to a friend. They were firing their bow machine guns, taking no careful aim, at the fearful pace they were going, but all around us fountains of foam rose in the sea as we plunged onwards.
"You know, John," said my brother, "it's a difficult thing for any gunners at all to fire their bow chasers at a little bobbing thing like a submarine. Of course, they may get us with a lucky shot, but I don't think they will."
They didn't.
The great liner saw us coming and slanted off obliquely to the north. It wasn't any use at all. We had the heels of her, though we knew that at any moment our engines might give out, owing to the fearful strain we were putting on them.