the day began to break, we were twenty sea miles out and had
already re-charged the batteries with so much power that, if necessary,
we could proceed for several hours under water. In the dusk of the dawn,
we had a new surprise.

Groening, who, by chance, had looked toward the bow where the outlines of
our boat were becoming visible, suddenly against all rules, grabbed my
arm. With mouth open, eyes staring, and an arm outstretched, he pointed
toward the bow.

"What is that?"

I ran up, bent forward, and followed with my eyes in the direction in
which he was pointing.

"What is that?" I asked him.

I hurried toward the bow, so as to be able to see better. The boat's
whole deck, from the conning tower to the prow, looked as if it had been
divided into regular squares, between which dark, indistinguishable
objects were moving in snakelike lines. Near me there was such a square.
I stooped down and picked up a steel cord about as thick as my finger. A
net, I thought, certainly a net.

"We have the remnants of the net all over us," I shouted through the
noise of the storm to Groening. "Get the nippers, hammer, and chisel
ready. As soon as it is light enough, we must go to work to cut it
free."

And the thick, dark snake--what was that? It came up to starboard,
slipped across the deck, and disappeared to port into the darkness. It
did not take us long to find out what kind of a snake it was, and I
comprehended everything fully. That persistent, mysterious pursuit by
the Frenchman was at once plain. Now I understood clearly what had
happened on the surface after the explosion of the mine. My heart froze
when I thought how readily the enemy had been able to follow our course.

We could easily trace the snake with all its curves, as it became
lighter, because it was a long cork hawser, made for the purpose of
sustaining the net. This was of light cork of about the thickness of a
forearm and was light brown in color.

About two hundred meters of this easily perceptible hawser were floating
on the water, and gave us a tail with many curves in it. This tail,
which we had been dragging after us, gave us the solution of the
puzzling pursuit.

When we had torn the net, with our engines at their highest speed, a
large piece of it to which the hawser was fastened had clung to our
U-boat and, after we had submerged, the hawser was still floating on the
surface and continued to drag along behind us, still floating when we
had