while the trawlers, with their sweep, furnished the best antidote for the little surprise party that he already had prepared for us.
“Scarcely had the trawlers entered the oily area than the jar of a heavy under-sea explosion jolted against the bottom of the Flash, which, a thousand yards distant, was just beginning to work up to full speed. Almost immediately three or four other explosions followed, coming so close together as to make one rippling detonation of tremendous violence. An instant later I saw several columns of grimy foam shoot skyward, two or three of them so close together that they seemed to ‘boil’ into each other as they spilled and spread in falling. Although neither of the trawlers appeared to be immediately over any of the explosions, both of them received terrific shocks. One of them I distinctly saw rear up till it seemed almost to be balanced on its rudder-post as a round hump of green water drove under it, while the scuppers of the other spurted white as they cleared the flood that a spreading foam geyser had thrown upon the deck. It seemed impossible that either of them could survive such shocks as I knew they must have received, and I fully expected to see nothing better than two foundering wrecks emerge from the smother which hovered above the scene of the explosions. Imagine my surprise, then, when two junk-like profiles (they were both of the marvellously sea-worthy ‘Iceland trawler’ type) came bobbing
serenely into sight again, and I noted with my glass that neither appeared to have suffered serious damage. On the score of lives, a tom-cat has nothing the best of a trawler. If it had been otherwise our whole fleet of them—and they, with the drifters, form the main strands of the finer meshes of our anti-U-boat net—would have been wiped out many times over.
“At the instant the jar of the first explosion made itself felt, the thought flashed through my mind that there actually was a U-boat lying on the bottom, and that the explosive charge on the sweep had been detonated against its hull. The ‘bunched’ explosions immediately following also lent themselves to this theory, and it was not till the distinct columns of blown water began rising in the air that I surmised the real cause of them—mines, probably laid so close together that the explosion of the first had set off the others. This fact we were shortly able to establish beyond a doubt.
“What had happened, as nearly as we could reconstruct it, was this: The U-boat had been a mine-layer, probably interrupted on its way to lay its eggs off one of our main fleet bases. The chances are that it had been sufficiently injured by my depth-charges to make it more of a risk than its skipper cared to take to proceed farther from his base; quite likely, indeed, he had to put back at once. Then the chance of preparing a little surprise
party for the ship responsible for his trouble must have occurred to him, and the result was that a snug little nest of mines was laid all the way around the marking buoy. Having more mines than he needed to barrage the buoy, he had scuttled several of those remaining after the first job was completed, and these had been the ones set off by the explosive charge on the trawlers’ sweep. The spreading of wreckage as bait around the trap was probably an afterthought, for it was so hurriedly done that it really defeated the end it was intended to accomplish. I am inclined to think, in fact, that, if the mines had laid round the buoy, with no spread of oil or wreckage left to decoy us into them, they might have had a victim or two to their credit. They were laid shallow enough to have bumped both sloops and destroyers, and the exploding of a mine against the bows of one or the other of these may well have been the first warning we had of Fritz’s little joke. As it was, that part of the show was so crudely done that it gave away that something was wrong.
“Yes, I have always thought of that as ‘Fritz’s little joke,’” continued the captain, bracing himself at a new angle to meet a rollicking cork-screw action that was working into the ship’s wallowings. “It was just the sort of a plant I would like to have left for Fritz, if our rôles had been reversed, and for a while I felt rather more kindly toward all Fritzes on account of having knocked up
against it. That feeling persisted until three or four months later, when the fortunes of war—in the shape of a luckily-planted depth-charge—paved the way for an opportunity for me to tell the story to a certain Hun Unterseeboot officer during the hour or two he was my guest on the way to base. He spoke English fairly, and understood it well; so that I was able to run through the yarn just about as I have told it to you. He gave vent to his approval in guttural ‘Ya’s’ and grunts of satisfaction until I ended by asking him if he didn’t think it was a jolly clever little joke. And what do you think he said to that?
“‘Choke,’ he boomed explosively; ‘choke, vy, mein frent, dot vos not ein choke ad all. He vos dryin to zink your destroy’r. Dot ist no choke.’”
The captain stretched himself with a whimsical smile. “How unpleasant it would be to be shipmates with a chap like that who couldn’t see the funny side of being blown up,” he observed presently.