ncident. He had always hated the English, even in his youth when for
a year he occupied an inconspicuous niche in one of the less fastidious
Public Schools. He hated them for the qualities he despised and found
so utterly inexplicable. He despised their lazy contempt for detail,
their quixotic sense of fairness and justice in a losing game, their
persistent refusal to be impressed by the seriousness of anything on
earth. He despised their whole-hearted passion for sports at an age
when he was beginning to be interested in less wholesome and far more
complex absorptions.... He despised their straight, clean affections
and quarrels and their tortuous sense of humour; the affectation that
led them to take cold baths instead of hot ones: their shy, rather
knightly mental attitude towards their sisters and one another's
sisters....

All these things von Sperrgebiet despised in the English. But he also
hated them for something he had never even admitted to himself.
Crudely put, it was because he knew that he could never beat an
Englishman. There was nothing in his spirit that could outlast the
terrible, emotionless determination in the English character to win.

Von Sperrgebiet's reflections came to an end with his cigarette. He
tossed the stump overboard, and raising a pair of glasses he focused
them intently on the horizon to the eastward.

For the space of nearly a minute he sat thus staring. From the
interior of the Submarine came the strains of a gramophone playing a
German patriotic air, and with it the smell of coffee. The crew were
at dinner, and a man's deep laugh floated up the shaft of the
conning-tower as if coming from the bowels of the sea.

The Oberleutnant lowered the glasses abruptly. Rolling up the chart he
hoisted himself on to his feet and bent over the tiny binnacle to take
the bearing of a faint smudge of smoke barely visible on the horizon.
This obtained, he lowered himself through the narrow hatchway and
climbed down the steel rungs into the interior of the compartment.

"Close down!" he said curtly. The gramophone stopped with a click, and
instantly all was bustle and activity within the narrow confines of the
steel shell.

The Second-in-Command, who was lying on his bunk reading a novel, sat
up and lifted his legs over the edge. He was a spectacled youth with a
cropped bullet-head and what had been in infancy a hare-lip. His beard
of about ten days' maturity grew in patches about