Sea-Hounds Part 10

"Quite the cleverest and simplest bit of camouflage I ever saw," said the captain, lowering his binoculars. "It's only the fact that we're looking down on her from a considerable height against that bright sheet of water that gives a chance to follow her real lines at all. From the deck--and even more so from the bridge of a submarine, or through its periscope--it would be a lot easier to tell what she _isn't_ than what she _is_. As a matter of fact, I can't say that I know what she is even now. It is evident that she _was_ a yacht, and no end of a beauty at that. But now, in that guise--probably some sort of patrol or anti-U-boat worker, for a guess, perhaps a 'Q.'"

The officer of the watch turned aside for a moment from the gyro across which he had been sighting. "I think she must be the '----,' sir," he said. "Some American millionaire had her in the Mediterranean, and, wanting to do his bit, brought her up to Portsmouth and turned her over to the Admiralty to do what they wanted with her so long as it would help to lick the Hun. She's been mixed up in several kinds of stunts, and is supposed to have a U-boat or two to her credit. Her present skipper's a Yank who came to her from a M.L. They say he's no end of a character, but right as rain on his job and with a natural nose for trouble. One of his hobbies is making his s.h.i.+p look what she isn't, and, in order to see her as she would appear to a U-boat, he goes out and studies her through the periscope of one of our own submarines. When one of these isn't handy, he sometimes goes out in a whaler and studies her through a stubby periscope poked over its gunwale. He got blown right out to sea one night when he was making some experiment from a whaler in 'moonlight visibility,' and didn't get back till the next morning. It had no effect on his enthusiasm, though, for he was out on the same stunt the next night. No question about his nerve, nor his luck, nor his skill, for that matter. Smart seamans.h.i.+p probably has as much to do with the fact that he has never been torpedoed as has his fancy camouflage."

I made up my mind at once that here was a man worth meeting and hearing the story of, but as the only base he seemed to have was not easy to reach, and as his s.h.i.+p was reported at sea on the only occasions I was free to go there, some weeks went by before I was able to carry out my plan of paying him a visit. Then, one morning, a nondescript craft, which might have been anything from a wood-pile to a Chinese junk half a mile away, came nosing inconsequentially through the lines of the Grand Fleet and moored alongside the very battles.h.i.+p in which I happened to be at that time.

"K---- has come in with the '----' to 'swing compa.s.ses,'" the navigating officer announced to the ward-room. "He's a 'converted side-wheel river ferry-boat' this morning, or something of the kind; and he's going to get blown to sea in a 'sudden gale,' or something of the kind; and he says that, if anyone doesn't believe it, to come aboard and he'll give 'em something to stimulate their 'stolid British imaginations.'"

As certain lockers of the "----" had not been entirely looted of their age-mellowed treasure when the yacht was dismantled for sterner service than lounging about limpid Mediterranean harbours, the doubters were, naturally, many; but it is pleasant to be able to record that those who came to scoff remained--to tea. Indeed, it was not until after tea that I had a chance for a half-hour's yarn alone with K---- in the "banquet-hall-deserted" splendour of the stripped saloon. It was then that he told me how it was he chanced to "come across and get into the game."

He used the latter expression several times, I remember, and to no one that I can recall having met, either on land or sea, was the grim work he was doing more of a "game" than to this brave, resourceful, devil-may-care Middle Westerner.

"I had had a fair bit of experience in yachting and boating during the last six or eight years before the outbreak of the war," he said, settling back at ease in one of the two remaining lounging-chairs, "and most of it has stood me in good stead at one time or another since I have been on the job over here. I sailed a single sticker on Lake Michigan for a number of seasons, and I used to run down from my home in Lake Forest to business in Chicago in my own motor-boat on and off during the summer. It was what I knew of the latter which got me on a 'M.L.' without any preliminary hanging about when I first came over early in the war. What I knew about sailing has been all to the good almost every day I have been at sea, from the time I lured on a U-boat by ringing up my 'M.L.' as a disabled fis.h.i.+ng-smack to the time when I had to bring this poor little old girl into port under canvas after I had knocked out her propellers with one of her own depth-charges." It was a fantastically amusing tale, that last. "It was the culmination of my experiments in scientific camouflage," said K----, with a baleful smile. "Up to that time any contrivances to deceive the Hun were getting more and more intricate right along; since then they have tended more and more toward extreme simplicity. It was this way, you see, that I happened to work up to that depth-charge crescendo. From the first I had been striving to give the U-boat mixed impressions of me, especially on the score of which way I was going. This, as I soon found out from studying the thing in the proper way, is much easier to do in the case of a man whose observation is limited to a few feet above the water than in the case of one who has a more lofty coign of vantage to con from.

That is to say, it's much easier to convey false impressions, especially regarding your direction, to a man with his eye to a periscope than to one in the foretop of a battles.h.i.+p, to take the two extremes. Trying now one thing and now another as I had more experience, I found that where at first every shot fired at me was directed ahead with a more or less approximate allowance for the s.h.i.+p's progress in that direction, after a while they began to go oftener and oftener astern, indicating they were confused as to my rate of change. It was just as I was about to put the crowning touch on my efforts in 'mixing direction' that the trouble occurred. As the experiments with this particular contrivance never went any further, there will hardly be any harm in my telling you what it was and how it worked.

"I had already, with the aid of a couple of slanting fins, attached something after the fas.h.i.+on 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-s.h.i.+ft 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 sh.e.l.ling 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 b.u.mp 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 s.h.i.+p 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 way I can account for the fact that this particular pirate didn't have a revenge after his own Hunnish heart. We were about evenly matched for guns probably, and doubtless I would have had rather better than an even break on that score, because a surface craft can stand more holing than a submarine. But there was nothing to prevent his taking a sneaking sight through his periscope from a safe distance and then slipping a mouldie at us, which, helpless as we were for a while, there would have been no way of avoiding. A moving s.h.i.+p of almost any cla.s.s, provided it has a gun to make him keep his distance, has a good fighting chance of saving herself from being torpedoed by the proper use of her helm; a disabled s.h.i.+p, though she has all the guns in the world, has no show if the Fritz really thinks she's worth wasting two or three torpedoes on.

If he has his nerve, and any luck at all, he ought to finish the job with one.

"So I think you'll have to admit," said K---- with a whimsical smile, "that, under the circ.u.mstances and considering what might have happened, I felt that I had no legitimate kick coming in having to take her home under sail. Fact is, I considered myself in luck to have a s.h.i.+p to take home at all. The rudder, luckily, though a good deal bent and twisted, had not been blown away. It took a lot of nursing to turn it, and, when we finally got her off under mainsail, forestaysail and jib, the eccentricities it developed took a lot of getting used to. Although it was quite fortuitous on our part, the course we steered during the thirty hours we put in returning to base was the most complex and baffling lot of zigzagging I ever had anything to do with. If a U-boat skipper lying in wait for us could have told what she was going to do next, I can only say that he would have known a lot more than I did.

"At the end of an hour or two a couple of trawlers hove in sight and closed us to be of what help they could in screening. They made a very brave show of it until we got under weigh, and then they were led just about the wooziest dance you ever heard tell of. By a lucky chance, for me, not for the trawlers, there was a spanking breeze on the port quarter (for the mean course to base, I mean); and it wasn't long before the little old girl, even under the comparatively light spread of sail on her, was slipping away at close to nine miles an hour. That won't surprise you if you noticed the lines of her. I've turned back in her log and found where she's run for thirty-six hours at fourteen miles, even with the drag of her screws, which always knock a knot or two off the sailing speed of a yacht with auxiliary power.

"Well, that nine miles an hour was a good bit better than those trawlers could do under forced draught, and after falling astern for a while, they started to catch up by shortening their courses by cutting my zigzags. That was where the fun came in. It would have been easy enough if I had been zigzagging according to Hoyle. But where I didn't know myself just what she was going to do next, how was I going to signal it to them, will you tell me? About every other time that they tried to antic.i.p.ate my course they guessed wrong, and were worse off than before as a consequence. They must have been a very thankful pair when one of the two destroyers which finally came up took them off to hunt the submarine. The other destroyer stood by to escort me in. Her skipper offered me a tow, but I was anxious to save face as much as possible by returning on my own, and so declined. In case of an attack it would have been better to have him screening than towing anyhow. In the end, when we got in to where the sea room was restricted, I was glad to take a hawser from a tug they sent to meet me to keep from putting her on the mud.

"You may well believe that effectually put an end to my experiments with 'movable sky,' and other similar mechanical complexities," K---- continued with a laugh. "Indeed, from that time on I have been inclining more and more to simpler things, rig outs that are sufficiently free from wheels within wheels to leave the mind clear for the real work in hand, which, after all, is putting down the Hun, not merely deceiving him as to what you are. You see how simple a setting our present one is; yet it is very complete in its way, and I have reasonable hopes of success with it. No, I can hardly tell you just what I am driving at with it, or just how I am going to go about it. In a month or two, when its possibilities have been exhausted and it has become a wash-out perhaps I shall be a bit freer to talk about it.

"Come and spend a day or two with me at the end of about six weeks, when my present round of stunting will probably be over, and I'll tell you all the 'Q' yarns that the law allows. The Hun is dead wise to the game on principle, so there can't be any point in keeping mum any longer on stunts that he's twigged a year or so ago, and which you'd have about as much chance of taking him in with as you'd have in trying to sell a gold brick on Broadway."

Three months went by before I was able to take advantage of K----'s invitation to pay him a visit at what he had called his "business headquarters," and as I had naturally expected that she would have played many and diverse parts in the interim, it was with some surprise that I found the "----" still "dressed" as she had been when I last saw her.

"We've never quite been able to pull it off," K---- explained, "and the waiting, and the not-quites and the might-have-beens have given me no end of a dose of that kind of hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.

But we've at least been lucky enough not to queer the game by showing our hand, so that there's still as good a chance as ever to make good with it under favourable circ.u.mstances. For that reason, the less we say about it for the present the better. That's in regard to this particular stunt, I mean. As for the rest of the 'Q' stuff that we've brought off, or tried to bring off, during the last three years--I'm at your service to-night after dinner. The Germans have been publis.h.i.+ng accounts of some of the stunts, under the t.i.tle of 'British Atrocities,' for some months now, but as there are slight variations from the truth here and there, you may still be interested in getting some of the details a bit nearer the original fount.

"They claimed, for instance, that when one of their 'heroic' U-boats ran alongside an armed British patrol boat, which had surrendered to it, to transfer a boarding-party, an officer of the M.L. rushed on deck and threw down on the deck of the submarine what the skipper of the latter took to be a packet of secret books, and that this 'packet,' exploding, eventually resulted in the sinking of the guileless German craft. Now, about the only thing which is correct about that account is the statement that a U-boat was sunk. It wasn't an armed M.L. that surrendered to Herr Ober-Lootenant--armed M.L.'s don't do that sort of thing, take my word for it--but an unarmed, or practically unarmed, pleasure yacht, which had apparently become disabled and blown to sea.

And the trusting U-boat did not come alongside to put aboard a prize crew to navigate its captive to a German port as they'd try to make you believe, but only to sink it with bombs placed in the hold, so as to save sh.e.l.ls or a torpedo. And it wasn't a packet of secret books that put the pirate down, but a 'baby,' and _my_ baby at that. No, I don't mean that I threw a real child of mine to Moloch--I haven't any to throw--but only that the idea of this literal _enfant terrible_, with a percussion cap on the top of his head and a can of T.N.T. for a body, originated under my hat.

"It's not surprising that the Huns didn't get the thing straight at first, though I believe one of their later versions does have a child in the cast, for none of the Germans present have yet returned to tell just what happened. About half of them never will see their beloved 'Vodderland' again, and I don't mind telling you that I'm not wearing any crepe on my sleeve on that account, either. Do you know"--K----'s face flushed red and his brow contracted in the anger the thought aroused--"that those ---- pirates were going right ahead to sink what they thought was nothing but a pleasure yacht, with a number of women and children in it, although it was plain as day to them that the one boat carried would founder under a quarter of our number? That's your Hun every time, and it was just that insensate l.u.s.t of his to murder anything helpless that I reckoned on in baiting my trap. I felt dead certain---- But I'll tell you the whole yarn this evening."

Several bits of salvage from the "----'s" pleasure-yacht days figured in the little feast K---- had spread that evening, and I remember particularly that the Angostura was from a bottle Commodore P---- had himself secured at the time when that incomparable bitter was distilled in a little ramshackle pile-built factory at Ciudad Bolivar, on the upper Orinoco. And the coffee that same genial _bon vivant_ had had blended and sealed in gla.s.s by an old Arab merchant at Aden, while the Benedictine had cost him a climb on foot through an infernally hot August afternoon to an ancient monastery inland of Naples. It was between sips of Benedictine--from a priceless little Morning Glory-shaped curl of Phoenician gla.s.s, picked up in Antioch one winter by the owner, and overlooked in the "stripping" operations--that K---- told me the story of the first of what he called his "Q-rious"

operations.

"There was a story attached to just about every little package of food and drink P---- left in the yacht," said K----, unrolling the gold foil from a cigar whose band bore the name of a Pinar del Rio factory which is famed as accepting no order save from its small but highly select list of private customers in various parts of the world; "and in the several letters he has written begging me to make free with them he has told me most of the yarns. The consequence was that, while the good things lasted--they're most of them finished now--I was getting in the way of enjoying eating and drinking them, telling where they came from and how they were come by, just about as much as good old P---- himself must have done. In fact, I think that their possible loss was about my worst worry when I tried my first 'Q' stunt on.

"The success of any kind of stunt for harrying the U-boat is very largely a matter of psychology, and this is especially so in the 'Q'

department. The main point of it is to make the enemy think you are more harmless than you really are. There is nothing new in the idea, for it is precisely the same stunt the old pirate of the Caribbean was on when he concealed his gun-ports with strips of canvas and approached his victims as a peaceful merchantman. As a matter of fact, I think it was the Hun himself who started the game in this war, for I'm almost dead sure that we had tried nothing of the kind on--in a systematic way, at any rate--up to the time one of his U-boats rigged up a mast and sails and lured on victims by posing as a fisherman in distress.

"Obviously, it's a game you can't use any kind of craft that is plainly a wars.h.i.+p in, and the burning question always is as to how far you will sacrifice punis.h.i.+ng power to harmlessness of appearance. A light gun or two is about as far as you can go in the way of shooting-irons, and even these are very difficult to conceal on a small boat. Likewise a torpedo tube. I tried that first stunt of mine without either, and that's where the psychology came in.

"Most of the 'Q-boats' they were figuring on at that time were of the slower freighter type, with a rather powerful gun mounted for'ard and concealed as well as possible by something rigged up to look like deck cargo.

"That was, however, all well and good as far as it went, I figured, but, from such study of the Hun's little ways as I had been able to make, I had my doubts as to whether an old cargo boat would prove tempting enough bait to put a Fritz in the proper mental state for a real 'rise'--one in which he'd deliver himself up to you bound and gagged, so to speak. _That_ was the kind of a thing I wanted to make a bid for, and, by cracky, I pulled it off.

"From all I could pick up, from the inside and outside, about the s.h.i.+ps that had already been torpedoed, I came to the conclusion that the Hun would go to a lot more trouble, and take a deal bigger chance, to put down a vessel with a number of pa.s.sengers than he would with a freighter. And even that early in the War a U-boat had exposed itself to being rammed by a destroyer, when it could have avoided the attack entirely by foregoing the pleasure of a Parthian shot at a lifeboat which was already half-swamped in the heavy seas. _That_ was the little trait of the Hun's that I reckoned on playing up to when I began to figure on taking the '----' out U-boat strafing without any gun larger than a Maxim aboard her. I'd have been glad enough of a good four-incher, understand, if there had been any way in the world it could have been concealed. But there wasn't, and rather than miss getting into the game at all, I was quite content to tackle it with such weapons as were available. That was where my 'che-ild' came in.

"On the score of weapons available, there were only two--the lance-bomb and the depth-charge. For the kind of game I had in mind, it was to the former that I pinned my faith. It was powerful enough to do all the damage needful to the sh.e.l.l of a submarine if only a chance to get home with it could be contrived. 'Getting it home' has always been the great difficulty with the lance-bomb, and up to that time the only chap to have any luck with it was the skipper of a M.L.--another Yank, by the way, who came over and got into the game in the same way, and about the same time, that I did. He had been the champion sixteen-pound hammer-thrower in some Middle Western college only a year or two before, and, by taking a double turn on his heeling deck, managed to chuck the bomb (which is on the end of a wooden handle, much like the old throwing hammer) about three times as far as anyone ever dreamed of, and cracked in the nose of a lurking U-boat with it.

"Unluckily, I was not a hammer-thrower, and so had to try to bring about an easier shot. It was with this purpose in view that I submitted a proposal to reconvert the '----' temporarily to the outward seeming of a pleasure yacht; to make her appear so tempting a bait that the Hun's l.u.s.t for _schrecklichkeit_, or whatever they call it, would lure him close enough to give me a chance at him. They were rather inclined to scoff at the plan at first, princ.i.p.ally on the ground that the enemy, knowing that there was no pleasure yachting going on in the North Sea, would instantly be suspicious of a craft of that character. I pointed out that there was still a bit of yachting going on in the Norfolk Broads, which the Hun, with his comprehensive knowledge of the East Coast, might well know of, and that there would be nothing strange in a craft from there being blown to sea in a spell of nor'west weather. Of course, the '----' isn't a Broads type by a long way, but I didn't expect the Hun to linger over fine distinctions any more than the trout coming up for a fly does. The sequel fully proved that I was right.

"It was largely because the stunt I had in mind promised to cost little more than a new coat of paint and a few rehearsals, which could easily be carried on in the course of our ordinary patrol duties, that I finally received somewhat grudging authorisation to go ahead with it. It was not till the whole show was over that I learned from the laughing admission of the officer who helped secure that authorization, that the fact that the output of real M.L.'s was becoming large enough so that they were about independent of the use of yachts and other pleasure craft for patrol work, also had a good deal to do with the granting of it.

"I already had several well-trained machine-gunners in the crew, so that about the only addition I had to make to the s.h.i.+p's company was a half-dozen boys to masquerade as ladies. As they were not meant to stand inspection at close range, nothing elaborate in the way of costume or makeup was necessary. They wore middy jackets, with short duck skirts, which gave them plenty of liberty of action. Most of them (as there was nothing much below the waist going to show anyway) simply rolled up their sailor breeches and went barelegged, and one who went in for white stockings and tennis shoes was considered rather a sw.a.n.ker. Their millinery was somewhat variegated, the only thing in common to the motley units of head-gear being conspicuousness. There was a much beribboned broad-brimmed straw, a droopy Panama, a green and a purple motor veil, and a very chic yachting effect in a converted cap of a lieutenant of Marines with a red band round it. Less in keeping, if more striking, was a Gainsborough, with magenta ostrich plumes, a remnant from some 's.h.i.+p' theatricals.

"Hair wasn't a very important item, but they all seemed to take so much pleasure in 'coiffeuring' that I took good care not to discourage their efforts in that direction. The spirit that you enter that kind of a game in makes all the difference in the world in its success, and these lads--and, indeed, the whole lot of us--were like children playing house. All of them were blondes--even a boy born in Durban, who had more than a touch of the 'tar brush,' and one--a roly-poly young Scot, who had made himself a pair of tawny braids from rope ravellings--looked like a cross between 'Brunnhilde' and 'The Viking's Daughter.'

"It was only during rehearsals, of course, that these lads were 'ladies of leisure.' The rest of the time I kept them on bra.s.s polis.h.i.+ng and deck-scrubbing, with the result that the little old '----' regained, outwardly at least, much of her pristine s.h.i.+p-shapiness. The 'gentlemen friends' of the 'ladies' were even more of a 'make-s.h.i.+p' product than the latter.

"Indeed, they were really costumes rather than individuals. I don't mean that we used dummies, but only that there were eight or ten flannel jackets and boater hats laid ready, and these were to be worn more or less indiscriminately by any of the regular crew not on watch. Their role was simply to loll on the quarterdeck with the 'ladies' while the U-boat was sizing us up, then to join for a few minutes in the 'panic'

following the hoped-for attack, and finally to beat it to their action stations.

"That a 'baby' was by far the most effective disguise for the first lance-bomb we hoped to chuck home was obvious at the outset. Both of them had heads, their general shapes (when dressed) were not dissimilar, while the 'long clothes' of the infant was found to have a real steadying effect on the missile, on the same principle that 'streamers'

act to bring an air-bomb down nose-first. Of course, a child in arms, like this one was to be, wasn't just the kind of thing one would take pleasure yachting; but I knew the Huns took their nurslings to beer gardens, and thought that that might make them think that the Englanders--who were incomprehensible folk anyhow--might take this strange way of accustoming their young to the waves which they sang so loudly of ruling.

"The decisive consideration, however, was the fact a baby was the only thing except a jewel-case that a panicky woman in fear of being torpedoed would stick to. As you can't get a lance-bomb in a jewel-case, it was plainly 'baby' or nothing.

"In the end, because I was afraid that none of the feminine make-ups was quite good enough not to awaken suspicion at close range--I decided that the heaving over of the 'baby' should be done by a 'gentleman' instead of by a 'lady.' As one of the seamen put it, it was only 'nateral that the nipper's daddy 'ud be lookin' arter 'im in time of danger,' and I had read of sailors being entrusted with children on sinking s.h.i.+ps. The man I picked for the job--the 'father of the che-ild,' as he soon came to be called--was not the one who had proved the best in distance throwing in the trials, but rather one on whose cold-blooded nerve I knew I could count in any extremity.

"He was a Seaman Gunner, named R----, and was lost a year ago when a rather desperate 'Q' stunt he had volunteered for miscarried. He had just the touch of the histrionic desirable for the intimate little affair in question, and the way he played his part fully justified my selecting him."

K---- leaned back in his chair and blew smoke rings for a minute before resuming his story. "There are some kind of stunts, like this one I've been trying to bring off for the last two or three months," he said, "that always seem to hang fire; and there are others where, from first to last, everything comes up to the scratch on time, just like a film drama. That first one I'm telling you about was like that, everybody--even to the U-boat--coming on to its cue. Indeed, when I think of it now, the whole show seems more like a big movie than anything else.

"By the time we were letter perfect in our parts, there came two or three days of just the kind of a storm I wanted to make a good excuse for a d.i.n.ky little pleasure boat being out in the middle of the North Sea. I took care, of course, to be 'blown' to the last position at which an enemy submarine had been reported.

"Then, where a destroyer or a M.L. might have cruised round for a month without sighting anything but fog and the smoke of some of our own s.h.i.+ps on the horizon, we picked up a Fritz running brazenly on the surface the first morning. That was first blood for my harmless appearance right there, for he must have seen us some time previously of course, and had we looked in the least warlike, would have submerged before even our lookout spotted his conning-tower.

"As it was, he simply began closing us at full speed, firing as he came.