CHAPTER III
THE OBER-LEUTNANT'S JAUNT
MIDNIGHT, somewhere off the North Cornish coast. To be more accurate, the position was, according to observations made by Ober-leutnant Otto von Loringhoven commanding H.I.M. unterseeboot 254, was Hatstone Point south-south-east 1/4 east, and Polgereen Point south by west 1/4 west. The rugged coast was all but hidden in the low-lying mist, only the loftier headlands being visible against the starlit sky. There was little or no wind, but shorewards a continual rumble betokened the presence of ground-swell—the "fag-end" of enormous waves generated hundreds of miles away in the vast Atlantic.
U 254 was proceeding dead slow towards the shore. The steady beat of her muffled exhausts was only just audible above the lap of the water against her blunt bows and the ripple in the wake of her triple propellers.
The ober-leutnant was standing on a raised platform that surrounded the elongated conning-tower. He was a tall, heavily built man—massive-looking in his long double-breasted coat and sea-boots. On his head he wore a black sou'-wester that, with the turned-up collar of his greatcoat and the dark muffler round his neck, left only a small portion of his face exposed: pale pasty features, shaggy beetling brows, small beady eyes, a large nose, flattened at the tip, and a loose mouth partly hidden by a closely trimmed moustache.
Close behind him stood the unter-leutnant, Hans Kuhlberg, a typical, loose-limbed, weak-chinned Prussian. No further description of this young swashbuckler is necessary. A British schoolboy was once asked by an examiner to describe the manners and customs of a certain savage tribe of Central Africa. His reply, "Manners none; customs beastly," would be equally applicable to Hans Kuhlberg.
A quartermaster at the steering-wheel on deck and a couple of hands using the lead-line were the only members of the piratical Hun crew visible; the others, eighty worthy upholders of the debased cult of German sea-power, were stowed away within the three hundred feet of steel hull.
"Report when you find fifty metres," ordered von Loringhoven for the twentieth time, addressing the leadsmen in harsh yet restrained tones, for acting under instructions they refrained from announcing the "cast" lest the sound of their voices would carry to the ears of an alert British patrol-boat's crew.
"Are you really going ashore, Herr Kapitan?" asked the unter-leutnant, who was vigorously engaged in chewing an apple—part of the spoils from a captured topsail schooner that had been sunk off Lundy a couple of days previously.