right on in through this so-called danger zone to harbour—than he was marching down Broadway to the pier—at least, if Broadway is like it was when I used to put in to New York as a kid in the Baltic.”
“But will you tell me,” I protested, “how a U-boat, firing two or three torpedoes from, say, just about where we are now, could possibly miss a mark like that?”
“Well, it would take a bit of missing from hereabouts, I admit,” was the reply; “only, if there is any Fritz still in the game with the nerve to try it, he would also be missing himself.”
“What would happen to him?” I asked.
“One or all of two or three things might happen,——” P—— answered, after ordering a point or two alteration in course to give safe berth to the nearing destroyer.
“He might get his hide holed by gunfire, he might get split open by a depth-charge, he might get rammed, and he might get several other things. With all the luck in his favour, he might even get a transport. But there’s one thing I can assure you he wouldn’t get—and that’s back to his base. There may be two or three bearings from which one of these big convoys appears to present a mark as wide and unbroken as the map of Ireland; but there’s nothing in heaven or earth to save the Fritz who hasn’t learned by the sad example of no
small number of his mates that it is quick suicide for him to slip a mouldie down one of them.”
“You mean that he doesn’t try it? that he’s afraid to take the chance?” I asked somewhat incredulously, for I had somehow come to regard Fritz, though a pirate, as a dashing and daring one when the stake was high enough.
“Except under very favourable circumstances, yes,” was the reply; “and now that, with the coming of the American destroyers and patrol boats, we are able to do the thing the way we want to, what Fritz might reckon as ‘very favourable circumstances’ are becoming increasingly fewer and farther between. Now a few months ago, when we were just getting the convoy system under weigh, and when there was a shortage of every kind of screening craft, things were different. Fritz’s moral was better then than it is now, and we didn’t have the means of shaking it that we have piled up since. At our first convoys, straggling and little schooled in looking after themselves, he used to take a chance as often as not, if he happened to sight them; but even then he rarely got back to tell what happened to him. There was the one that tried to celebrate the advent of ‘Peace-on-Earth-Good-Will-to-Men’ last Christmas Day by sinking the Amperi, which was one of a convoy the Whack (in which I was Number Two at the time) was helping to escort. Well, I couldn’t say much for his ‘Good-Will-toward-Men,’ but he certainly found a short