that the submarine seemed to
have been blown to the surface by the force of our exploding
depth-charges rather than to have come up voluntarily, may account for
the fact that no head was poked above the bridge rail as she emerged. If
she had come up deliberately it would have been the duty of the skipper
and a signalman to pop out on to the bridge at once to be ready for
eventualities. Evidently they had no chance to do so on this occasion,
and as a consequence spun out their thread o' life by anywhere from
twenty to thirty seconds--whatever that was worth to them.

"My third shot plumped into her abaft the conning-tower, and the
explosion which followed it had a good deal more behind it than the
charge of a twelve-pounder shell. Before I had a chance to see what had
blown up, however, we had rammed her, and whatever damage that shot had
caused dissolved in the chaos of what proved the real _coup de grace_.
That ramming was undoubtedly one of the prettiest little jobs of its
kind, one of the most neatly finessed, ever brought off.

"Since running over the submarine and dropping the depth-charges the
captain had turned the _Whack_ through thirty-two points, a complete
circle. This brought her back to a course just at right angles to the
beam of the now helpless enemy, toward which she was driven to the limit
of the last kick of the engines. Just before the moment of impact the
screws were stopped dead, so as to sink the bow and reduce the chance of
riding over the U-boat and rolling it under her stem, as has
occasionally happened, instead of cutting it straight in two. The jar,
when it came, was terrific, throwing from his feet every man not holding
to something; yet there was that in the clean, sweet crunch of it that
told me that it had accomplished all the heart could desire, even before
the next second furnished graphic ocular evidence of it.

"The sharp, fine bows of the _Whack_ drove home well abaft the
conning-tower, and--though the staggering jar told of the resistance
met--for all the eye could see, cut through like a knife in soft butter.
Indeed, the amazing cleanness of the cut has always seemed to me the
most remarkable feature of the whole show. The bow end of the U-boat,
with the conning-tower, was the section which was cut off on my
side--port--and the even cross-section of it that gaped up at me was
very little different from that I once saw when one of our own
submarines was being sawed through amidsh