Sometimes the torpedo was seen and avoided by a quick turn of the wheel. There were other occasions when the torpedo seems to follow a ship. I remember reading this tale. "At 2.14 I saw the torpedo and felt certain that it would mean a hit either in the engine or the fire room, so I ordered full speed ahead, and put the rudder over hard left. At a distance of between two and three hundred yards, the torpedo took a sheer to the left, but righted itself. For an instant it appeared as if the torpedo might pass astern, but porpoising again, it turned toward the ship and struck us close by the propellers."
So much for blind chances. One hears curious tales. The column of water caused by the explosion tossed onto the forward hatch of one merchant ship a twisted half of the torpedo; there was a French boat struck by a torpedo which did not explode, but lay there at the side violently churning, and clinging to the boat as if it were possessed of some sinister intelligence. I heard of a boat laden with high explosives within whose hold a number of motor trucks had been arranged. A torpedo got her at the mouth of the channel. An explosion similar to the one at Halifax raked the sea, the vessel, blown into fragments, disappeared from sight in the twinkling of an eye, and an instant later there fell like bolides from the startled firmament a number of immense motor trucks, one of which actually crashed on to the deck of another vessel!
Meanwhile, I suppose, some hundred and fifty feet or more below, "Fritz," seated at a neat folding table, wrote it all down in his log.
X
THE END OF A SUBMARINE
Two days before, in a spot somewhat south of the area we were going out to patrol, a submarine had attacked a convoy and sunk a horse boat. I had the story of the affair months afterwards from an American sailor who had seen it all from a nearby ship. This sailor, no other than my friend Giles, had been stationed in the lookout when he heard a thundering pound, and looking to port, he saw a column of water hanging just amidships of the torpedoed vessel, a column that broke crashing over the decks. In about three minutes the ship broke in two, the bow and the stern rising like the points of a shallow V, and in five minutes she sank. The sea was strewn with straw; there were broken stanchions floating in the confused water, and a number of horses could be seen swimming about. "All you could see was their heads; they looked awful small in all that water. Some of the horses had men hanging to them. There was a lot of yelling for help." The other ships of the convoy had run for dear life; the destroyers had raced about like hornets whose nest is disturbed, but the submarine escaped.
We left a certain harbour at about three in the afternoon. Many of the destroyers were out at sea taking in a big troop convoy and the harbour seemed unusually still. The town also partook of this quiet, the long lateral lines of climbing houses staring out blankly at us like unresponsive acquaintances. Very few folk were to be seen on the street. We were bound forth on an adventure that was drama itself, a drama which even then the Fates, unknown to us, were swiftly weaving into a tragedy of vengeance, yet I shall never forget how casual and undramatic the Esplanade appeared. A loafer or two lounged by the door of the public house, a little group of sailors passed, a jaunting car went swiftly on its way to the station; there was nothing to suggest that these isles were beleaguered; nothing told of the remorseless enemy at the gates of the sea.
All night long under a gloomy, starless sky we patrolled waters dark as the very waves of the Styx. The hope that nourished us was the thought of finding a submarine on the surface, but we heard no noise through the mysterious dark, and a long, interminable dawn revealed to us nothing but the high crumbling cliffs of a lonely and ill-reputed bay. Where were they then, I have often wondered? When had they their last look at the sun? Had they any consciousness of the end which time was bringing to them with a giant's hurrying step? At about six o'clock we swung off to the southward, and in a short time the coast had faded from sight.
From six o'clock to about half past ten we swept in great circles and lines the mist encircled disk of the pale sea which had been entrusted to our keeping. We were at hand to answer any appeal for aid which might flutter through the air, to investigate any suspicious wreckage; above all, to fulfill our function of destruction. I have spoken elsewhere of the terror which lurks in the word destroyer. We were hunters; beaters of the ambush of the sea. About us lay the besieged waters, yellow green in colour, vexed with tide rips and mottled with shadows of haze and appearances of shoal.
We were on the bridge. Suddenly a voice called down the tube from the lookout on the mast: