ere 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 shiver 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
bump 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 ship 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 helple