“I had already, with the aid of a couple of slanting fins, attached something after the fashion of bilge-keels, only just below the water-line on either quarter, worked up a fairly satisfactory ‘bow wave’ aft, and I was endeavouring to supplement this by a scheme for making it appear as though the sky was moving past her funnel in the direction it wasn’t. You see, I was working on the same principle which deceives you when you think the standing train you are in is in motion when you see the one on the next track start up.
“As the U-boat skipper’s ‘look-see’ is often
limited to a hurried sort of a peep, I figured that if I could contrive to keep a rather conspicuous imitation sky of canvas running past the masts and funnels in the same direction she was going, only faster, it might create the illusion—in the distorted ‘worm’s eye’ vision of the man at the periscope—that she was going in the opposite direction. I studied some make-shift rigs from water-level through a periscope, and made up my mind the scheme was worth trying.”
K—— relighted his cigar and resumed with a sad smile.
“I still think the idea was good,” he said, “but it took too complicated an installation to carry it out, especially on a small craft with a low freeboard. There were gearings and transmissions and rollers, and heavens knows what not, needed to make the endless strip of canvas ‘sky’ run smoothly, and there were also many wires and ropes. It was one or the other of the latter which was responsible for the disaster, for while the thing was still in the ‘advanced experimental’ stage a U-boat popped up close by one day—probably a bold attempt on its skipper’s part to see if he really saw what he thought he had seen—and I spun the ‘——’ around on her tail (one of the nice things about her is that she will turn in a smaller circle than most destroyers) and tried, first choice, to ram him, and, second choice, to drop a depth-charge down the hole he had ducked into. I was too
late to ram by a few seconds, and there must have been a good fathom or two of clearance between my keel and the conning-tower I had driven for. The bridge and the two periscopes he had ‘turtle-necked’ in showed clean and sharp in the clear water as I leaned over the port side of the bridge—the easiest chance a man ever had for kicking off a ‘can’ just where it ought to go. As I turned to the depth-charge release I already had visions of him falling apart like a cracked egg, with bobbing bubbles and howling Huns coming up to the surface together. It was only a couple of days before that I had picked up several British fishermen—all that were left alive after a U-boat skipper had vented his morning hate by shelling the boat in which they were leaving their sinking trawler—and I was still mad enough to want to ram Heligoland if a chance had offered. I felt a kind of savage joy in the chance to put that tin of T.N.T. where it would wipe out a bit of the score I had been checking up against the Hun, and I seemed to see a sort of a Hand of Fate in the fist I was reaching up to the handle of the release. It couldn’t miss, I told myself, and—well, it didn’t.
“The explosion ‘jolted’ at the proper interval all right, but not in the proper place, nor in the proper way. I was watching for the up-boil squarely in the middle of the right-angling propeller swirl of the submarine, but that was receding, smooth and unbroken, when the crash came. The
fact is, I never did see the spout from that charge—for the very good reason that it was tossed up almost under the ‘——’s’ counter, where it knocked off the blades of both propellers and all but blew in her stern. The depth-charge had fouled a trailing wire from some of my ‘stage scenery sky’ and been dragged along to detonate close astern. I saw her taffrail shiver and kick upwards, and the shock was strong enough to upset my balance even on the bridge. That last was the first thing that made me sure something had slipped up, for, ordinarily, the jolt from a properly set ‘can’ is no more than that from a sharp bump against the side of a quay. I mean the jolt as felt on the bridge, of course; below, and especially in the engine-room or stokehold, it is a good deal more severe. It was the shattering jar of this one that told me it had gone wrong, and then, when she began to lose way and refuse to answer her helm—the rudder had been knocked out, too, but not enough so that it couldn’t be tinkered up to serve temporarily—I knew it was something serious.
“It was a good deal of a relief to find that, badly buckled as some of the plates were, she wasn’t making any more water aft than the pumps could easily take care of. That was the first thing I looked after, and the next was the U-boat; or rather, we were looking out for both at the same time. If there was one thing more than another that helped to reconcile me to the double disappointment of
missing my crack at the Hun and knocking my own ship out, it was the fact which soon became apparent, that Fritz never knew about the latter. If he had known the shape I was in, he could have finished me off a dozen times over during the hour or more the ‘——‘ was lying helpless, and before the first armed trawler showed up in answer to my S.O.S. Just why he didn’t, I could never make quite sure, but the chances are it was one or both of two things. It is quite possible that the biff from the depth-charge—which must still have been almost as near to him as it was to me when it exploded—may have done the submarine really serious injury, perhaps even sinking it. We never found any evidence, however, that this had been the case. Whether he was damaged or not, there is no doubt that his close call gave him a bad scare. There could have been nothing in the explosion to tell him that it did any harm to his enemy, and, since he did not have his periscope up, there was no way he could see what had happened. Doubtless expecting another ‘can’ any moment, and knowing well that it would be only a matter of an hour or two until there would be a lot more craft joining in the chase, it is probable that he followed the tactics which you can always count on a U-boat following when it knows a hunt is on—that is, to submerge deeply and lose no time in making itself just as scarce as possible in the neighbourhood where the hue-and-cry has started. That’s the only