eet out by means of a light boom. The next move was to be up to
Fritz, and it was fairly certain he would do one of two things--submerge
and make off, or remain on the surface and begin to shell us. In the
latter case we were to start firing in reply, of course; but that was
only incidental to the main plan. This was to wait until we were hit,
or, preferably, until he fired an 'over,' the fall of which, on account
of his low platform, he could not spot accurately, and then to fire the
tank of kerosene. A line to a trigger, rigged to explode a
percussion-cap, made it possible to do this from the rail. As the
flames, besides giving off a lot of smoke, would themselves leap high
enough to be seen from the other side, it was reasonable to suppose that
Fritz would be deluded into thinking we were burning up, and make his
approach a good deal more carelessly than otherwise. If he persisted in
closing us on the surface, there would be nothing to it but to make what
fight we could with our fo'c'sl' gun, and try to make it so hot for him
that he would have to go down before his heavier shells had done for us.
But if, following his usual procedure, he made his approach submerged,
then there were two or three other little optical and aural illusions
prepared for his benefit. I will tell you of these in describing how we
actually used them."

D---- lay quiet for a minute, the wrinkles of a baleful grin of
reminiscence showing on both sides of the aperture of the Balaclava.
"The first chance we had to try the thing out it nearly did us in," he
chuckled presently. "No, Fritz had nothing to do with it. _He_, luckily
for us, submerged and beat it off after firing three or four
shots--probably through mistaking the smoke of a couple of trawlers just
under the horizon for that of destroyers. It was all due to bad luck and
bad judgment--principally the latter, I'm afraid. It was bad luck to the
extent that the U-boat was sighted down to leeward, so that there was no
alternative but to put over my 'fire-raft' on the windward side. The bad
judgment came in through my underestimating the force of the wind and
the fierceness with which the kerosene would burn when fanned by it.
Scarcely had it been touched off before there was a veritable
_Flammen-werfer_ playing against thirty or forty feet of the windward
side, and in a way which made it impossible for a man to venture there
to cast off the wire cables which moored the raft. As this class of