“The whaler which, following its instructions, had been pulling easterly for some minutes, now bore about four points on the port quarter, so that R——, in his apparent endeavour to call its attention to the deserted babe, could not have seemed to have been doing anything suspicious when he swung the bundle above his head and rushed to the rail almost opposite the U-boat’s conning-tower. That rotary upward and backward swing was absolutely necessary for getting distance with, and without it there was no way that forty or fifty pound infant could have been hurled the fifteen feet or more which still intervened. As it was, it landed, fair and square, in the angle formed by the after end of the conning-tower and the deck. At the same instant our machine-guns opened up through several of the port scuttles, which had been specially enlarged and masked with that end in view, and in a few seconds there was not an unwounded Hun in sight. The gunners had been the first ones sprayed, with the result that they were copped before firing a shot. Their torpedoes, or course, were too close, and not bearing properly enough to launch.
“Immediately following the explosion of the bomb and the opening of the machine-gun fire a strange thing happened. I saw the U-boat’s bow-rudders begin to slant, saw her begin to gather way,
heard the hum of motors as the rattle of the Maxims (their work completed) died out, and—down she went, and with three hatches open, and a ragged hole abaft the conning-tower where the ‘baby’ had exploded in its final tantrum. I could never get any sure explanation of this from any of the survivors we fished up out of the water, but everything points to the probability that the skipper—perhaps inadvertently, as the up-kick of the bomb blew him overboard—pulled the diving klaxon, and the officer in the central control room, not knowing just how things stood above, proceeded to submerge as usual. Doubtless the men who should have been standing by to close the hatches in such an emergency had been caught by the machine-gun fire. With every man below tied down with his duties in connection with submerging her, it is quite conceivable that nothing could be done, once she was below the surface, to stop the inrush of water, and that she was quickly beyond all hope of bringing up again. I didn’t have a fair chance to size up the hole ripped open by the bomb, but rather think that also was large enough to have admitted a good deal of water.
“It was rather disappointing in a way, having her go down like that, for as things had turned out, it was a hundred to one we should otherwise have captured her almost unharmed. There was a good deal of solace, however, in the fact that none of the Huns were getting back to tell what happened to
them, so that this identical stunt was left open for use again. As a matter of fact, variations of it were used a number of times, by one kind of craft or another, before an unlucky slip-up—the one which finished poor R——, by the way—gave the game away and started us veering off on other tacks. I have had a number of successes since that time,” concluded K——, pouring me a glass of the yacht’s 1835 Cognac as a night cap, “but never a one which was quite so much like taking candy from a child as that ‘opener.’”
CHAPTER X
THE WHACK AND THE SMACK
There was always a strange and distinctive fascination to me in standing on the bridge of one ship and watching other ships—and especially lines of ships—push up and sharpen to shape above the edge of the sea.