M.L.s have wooden hulls, you will readily see that this was no joke.

"The splash of the beam seas proved an efficacious antidote, so far as
the hull was concerned, however; but how some other highly inflammable
material I was carrying 'midships escaped being fired in the minute or
more that I was swinging her through sixteen points to bring the raft to
the leeward of her---- Well, I can only chalk that up to the credit of
the special Providence that is supposed to intervene especially to save
drunks and fools. You can bet your life I never let myself be tempted
into making that break again, though it involved a trying exercise of
self-restraint when it chanced that the very next Fritz I sighted also
bore down the wind.

"The two or three U-boats which were sighted in the course of the next
five or six weeks ducked under without firing a shot, and I was
beginning to think that perhaps they had somehow got wind of my little
plan and were taking no chances in playing up to it. Then, one fine
clear morning, up bobs a Fritz about six thousand yards to windward, and
begins going through his part of the show almost as though he was one of
our own submarines with which I had been rehearsing. His firing at us
was about as bad as mine at him; but he finally lobbed one over that was
close enough, so I knew he couldn't tell whether it was a hit or not,
and on that I touched off the fire-raft, which was soon spouting up a
fine pillar of flame and smoke. To discourage his approach on the
surface, I kept up a brisk firing to give him the impression that we
were going to live up to British Navy traditions by going down fighting,
and to convince him that it would be much safer to close under water.
This came off quite according to plan, and presently I saw the loom of
his conning-tower dissolve and disappear behind the spout of one of our
shells, which looked to have been a very close thing.

"I stood on at a speed of five or six knots, but on a course which I
reckoned he would anticipate and allow for. When I figured that he was
not over a mile away, I dropped a float over the stern with a time-bomb
attached to it, the detonation of which in this way I had found by
experiment to furnish a much more life-like imitation of an internal
explosion in a ship--when heard in hydrophones, I mean--than that of a
depth-charge. The periscope which was shortly poked cautiously up for a
tentative 'look-see' could not, I am pretty nearly dead cer