wered the muzzles again when
they saw it was apparently only a half-distracted parent trying to
signal for the boat to come back for him and his babe. I have no doubt
that there were some very sarcastic remarks passed on that U-boat at
this juncture about the courage of the English male. _If_ there were,
the next act of the coolest and bravest boy I ever knew literally
forced the words down their throats.

"The whaler which, following its instructions, had been pulling easterly
for some minutes, now bore about four points on the port quarter, so
that R----, in his apparent endeavour to call its attention to the
deserted babe, could not have seemed to have been doing anything
suspicious when he swung the bundle above his head and rushed to the
rail almost opposite the U-boat's conning-tower. That rotary upward and
backward swing was absolutely necessary for getting distance with, and
without it there was no way that forty or fifty pound infant could have
been hurled the fifteen feet or more which still intervened. As it was,
it landed, fair and square, in the angle formed by the after end of the
conning-tower and the deck. At the same instant our machine-guns opened
up through several of the port scuttles, which had been specially
enlarged and masked with that end in view, and in a few seconds there
was not an unwounded Hun in sight. The gunners had been the first ones
sprayed, with the result that they were copped before firing a shot.
Their torpedoes, or course, were too close, and not bearing properly
enough to launch.

"Immediately following the explosion of the bomb and the opening of the
machine-gun fire a strange thing happened. I saw the U-boat's
bow-rudders begin to slant, saw her begin to gather way, heard the hum
of motors as the rattle of the Maxims (their work completed) died out,
and--down she went, and with three hatches open, and a ragged hole abaft
the conning-tower where the 'baby' had exploded in its final tantrum. I
could never get any sure explanation of this from any of the survivors
we fished up out of the water, but everything points to the probability
that the skipper--perhaps inadvertently, as the up-kick of the bomb blew
him overboard--pulled the diving klaxon, and the officer in the central
control room, not knowing just how things stood above, proceeded to
submerge as usual. Doubtless the men who should have been standing by to
close the hatches in such an emergency had been caught by the
m