The fact that the French destroyer continually followed us at the same distance made me certain. There was no doubt about it. We had been discovered and were pursued. Soon the Frenchman would call for aid and would have all the bloodhounds of the sea on our scent and following us. By this time our storage batteries had begun to be exhausted, and the water was a hundred meters deep so that it was impossible for us to lie on the bottom.

“Nice prospects,” I thought to myself. To the mate and crew in the “Centrale,” I called loudly so that all could hear me:

“Well, now we have gotten rid of him at last. Didn’t I say it was only a coincidence?”

I wanted to relieve the tension on the nerves of the men, because I knew how they had gone on for days at a high pitch of excitement.

In my plans, I had counted on the darkness, which must come soon. We would be very economical of the power, so that it would take us to the point which I had selected after carefully studying the chart. We kept to the same course for half an hour. Then, when the darkness must have settled down, I turned off at an angle of ninety degrees, and headed straight for the coast, where I knew the depth would permit us to rest on the bottom, to wait until the enemy had given up his manhunt. This would be towards morning, I thought, especially if the storm coming up from the southwest should increase in violence so that the searching of the water with nets would become very difficult.

The point that I had selected for our resting place was far from comfortable. And it was marked on the chart, not with the reassuring “Sd.” which indicated a sand bottom, but with the dreaded “St.” which meant the bottom was stony. But we had no choice. And when the devil is in a pinch, he will eat flies, although he is accustomed to better food. We did not rise again, since we knew it was dark over the sea, but continued at a considerable depth without incident and slowly approached our goal.

About midnight, according to my calculations, we would be able to touch the bottom. And the storage batteries had to last up to that time. KrÜger figured and figured and came to the conclusion that they would hardly last long enough.

Until ten o’clock we had heard our friend’s propellers over us several times. Thereafter all became quiet on the surface, and, relieved, I drew a deep breath. They had lost the scent. It became bearable again in the U-boat. I sat on the stairway leading to the “Centrale” and was eating sandwiches and drinking hot tea with the other officers and the rest of the crew. It was almost twelve o’clock and still we had not touched bottom. What would happen if the computation of our location was wrong? This could easily have occurred, because of the strong current and our slow speed.

Half-past twelve! Still no bottom! Engineer KrÜger was nervously stamping his feet and turned out one electric light after another in order to save power. For the same reason, the electric heating apparatus had been cut off for a long time, and we were very cold.

At five minutes to one we felt a slight scraping. The motors were stopped and then we reversed them in order to decrease our speed. A slight jolt! We filled the ballast tanks and were lying on the bottom where we could wait for morning at our ease. Who thought that? He who imagined that we would have any rest was disappointed. We were lying on a rock, and the tide turned about two o’clock, and the southwest wind swept the sea fiercely.

At the beginning, it seemed as if we would be all right, down there on the “St.” bottom, but we soon discovered differently—when the rolling began. There was no chance of gentle resting, as on the soft sand of the North Sea, but, instead, we banged and racked from one rock to another, so it was a wonder the boat could stand it at all.

Sometimes it sounded as if large stones were rolling on deck and, again, our boat would fall three or four meters deeper with a jolt, so that the manometer was never at rest, and we had to stand this continued rising and falling between twenty-two and thirty-eight meters.

At last, towards four o’clock, we gave it up. At some of the joints in the ship, there were small leakages, and none of us had any thought of sleeping. We, therefore, went up to the surface.

I opened the conning tower hatch and let the fresh air rush against me. I had a queer sensation. It seemed to me as if we had been buried in the deep for an eternity and had had a long, bad dream.

But we had no time to dream. The storm had not calmed, but continued in its fury, and it was not long before we in the tower were soaking wet. However, to our satisfaction, the water was much warmer than in the North Sea. We noticed that the last hours had brought us much closer to our object.

It was the Gulf Stream that was flowing by us and which, in this section, is really warm, running between two shores close together.

The night was coal black. At a great distance astern, two light-houses flashed, one white and the other red. It was easy for us to know our position. No enemy was in sight, so he must have abandoned his search as useless. Can any one understand with what relief we realized this fact? Confidently we began to look ahead to success now that, at last, the dangers of the mine fields, which had been greater than we had expected, were behind us.

The exhausted batteries were quickly re-charged, in order to be ready for other emergencies, and then, with our Diesel engines running, we went out into the open ocean, away from the unfriendly shores, to get some fresh air and to rest our nerves.

When 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.

GrÖning, 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 GrÖning. “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 submerged to a great depth. The Frenchman, who had discovered us on account of the explosion, had observed this, and, in spite of all our twistings and turnings, could follow us easily.

It was a master work of our able sea crew to cut clear that heavy steel net. The sea became still higher and washed furiously over the deck, angered by the resistance of our little nutshell. The men were standing up to their stomachs in the white, foaming waves, and had to use all their strength to stand against their force. Full of anxiety, I sat in the conning tower with a life-saving buoy ready and followed closely with worried eyes every move of my men during their dangerous work.

All went well, and, after a half hour’s hard work, we were rid of the troublesome net. The nippers, hammer, and chisel and six drenched sailors disappeared down the conning tower. Each of the six held in his numbed, wet fist a rusty piece of the net as a souvenir of the fourteenth day of April.

The sun arose as if nothing had happened. From the eastern horizon it shone over the French coast as if to say:

“I am neutral! I am neutral!”

When it got up higher in the heavens and sent its greeting to England, it shivered and hid behind a thick cloud.

What was the matter with it? What was it that destroyed the joy of the greeting of the young morning? What was it yonder that wounded its neutral heart?

A steamer approached. Thick, black clouds of smoke poured out along her wake and hung heavily over the sea. She had two high, thin mastheads, two funnels, slanting slightly toward the stern, and a light-colored hull with a high bridge. “A funny ship,” we decided and submerged.

When we saw her clearly through the periscope after a while, we found out the discouraging fact that she was a hospital ship. The snow-white color, the wide green bands from the bow to the stern, and the large Red Cross on the hull and the mast tops easily identified her as such.

I was just about to turn away, as an attack upon a sacred Red Cross ship could not be thought of, when my eyes as if by magic became glued to something I could not make my brain believe, something unheard of. I called GrÖning to the periscope, so that he could be sure I made no mistake. No, I was right, and, to my amazement, I saw an insolence which was new to this world. No wonder that the sun had hidden its face in order not to see this scorn and mockery of humanity. No neutral sun could shine on anything like that. Only the moon could stand such lights, although they must disgust even the moon, used to dark deeds.

The ship, which was safe under the holy flag of humanity and mercy, was loaded from bow to stern with artillery supplies, and amongst the guns and ammunition there was crowded an army of soldiers and horses. Under the protection of the colors of the flags, which they were so atrociously misusing, they were proceeding in the daylight on the way to the front.

“Such a crowd!” exclaimed GrÖning, and stepped back from the periscope.

“And such a shame that we can’t touch it,” said I, furious, and stamped on the iron floor so that it resounded. “I would like to have gotten hold of it. Such nasty people, such hypocrites! But it can’t be helped. The boat is too fast and too far away for us to head it off.”

Of course, we tried and went after it at top speed for some time. But the distance became greater instead of lessening, and, with our batteries exhausted, we had to abandon the chase. Then we turned, furious and swearing, and came to the surface again after a little time.

It was a very unpleasant feeling, after a short chase, to have to lie with exhausted batteries, and limp ahead like a lame horse. Consequently we did not attempt any new enterprise, but remained on the open water for several hours charging our storage batteries. Just as we were about through with this work, there came along an insolent trawler which started to chase us. None of us had any desire to submerge again, because the sun was shining so beautifully, and it became warmer with each minute we headed south.

As the propeller, now free from the nets with which we were fouled, could give us our best speed, we immediately began the race and hastened laughingly and in good spirits ahead. Our boat cut through the waves with such speed as it showed when it first came from its wharf. The foam made a silver-white mane for us. What did we care if we got wet? We went at top speed, and, smiling, looked at the smoking and puffing steamer behind us.

“He’ll never catch us,” I said to KrÜger, who had come up to the conning tower to ask if we were going fast enough, or if he should try to get more speed out of our engines. “Just keep her turning at the same rate, Herr Engineer. That’s sufficient. It looks now as if we were gaining,” I told him.

Our pursuer seemed to realize he could not overtake us and tried to anger us in other ways. Suddenly a gun flashed and a cloud of brown smoke surrounded the small steamer for a second. Shortly after that a small shell splashed into the water about a thousand meters from us and a water spout not higher than a small tree arose from the sea.

We laughed aloud.

“Such a rotten marksman! He wants to irritate us with a shotgun. That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s an insolence without an equal,” argued Lieutenant Petersen angrily, who felt that he had been insulted in his capacity of the artillery officer aboard. “We should not submit to this outrage. May I answer him, Herr Captain?” he asked me with eyes flashing.

“Yes, you may try as far as I am concerned, Petersen, but only three shots. You can’t hit him at this distance, anyway, and our shells are valuable.”

Grinning with joy, Petersen hurried to the guns, leveled, aimed and fired, himself, while the water washed around him up to his waist.

“Too short to the right!” I shouted to him, after I observed the high water spout through my double marine glasses.

The next shot fell close to the steamer. It became too hot for our pursuer. He turned quickly and went back in the same direction from which he had come. But the hunting fever had gotten into our blood. We also turned and pursued the fleeing pursuer. Show us what you can do now, engines!

Shot after shot flashed, roaring from our cannon. The distance was almost too great for our range. We had to set the gun at the highest possible angle in order to have any chance of hitting him. The first shots all fell short, or to the side, but at the eighth we made a hit. A roaring hurrah greeted the dark-brown explosion which marked the arrival of the shell on the trawler.

In vain, the trawler sent one shot after another at us. They never came near us. On our side, however, one hit followed another, and we could see that the hostile ship was listing heavily to port, and we hoped to be able to give him his death blow, when the outlines of three of his colleagues were sighted behind and to the right and left of him, approaching at great speed. Our only chance was to turn again in order to avoid being surrounded, since too many dogs can kill the hare.

Early in the evening we submerged to keep ourselves at a safe depth. We were very tired, because we had had thirty-eight hours of work and realized, now that all the excitement was over, how the nerves began to relax. To begin with, the nerve strain showed itself by the fact we could hardly go to sleep, tired as we were. And when we did doze off at last, we had many disturbing dreams. I, myself, lay awake for hours and heard through the open doors, in the deadly quiet of the U-boat, how the men tossed about in their bunks during their sleep, talking and muttering. It was as if we were in a parrot’s cage instead of a submarine. Also I lived over again during the night most of the events of the past hours. The only difference was, peculiarly enough, that I was never the fish, but always the fisherman above the surface who constantly tried to catch my own U-boat with a destroyer.

When I woke I could hardly untangle the real situation, because I saw the French Captain-Lieutenant’s black-bearded face before me, when, with great joy in his small dark eyes, he said:

“Diable, il faut attraper la canaille!”