Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/211

1918] they would have promptly put these wretches out of their misery, but they had expended all their ammunition. Darkness was now closing in; our men saw that their vigil was to be a long one ; they sent two chasers to Penzance, to get a new supply of bombs, and also sent a radio call for a destroyer. The spot where the submarine had bottomed was marked by a buoy; lanterns were hung out on this buoy; and two units of chasers, six boats in all, prepared to stand guard. At any moment, of course, the struggling U-boat might come to the surface, and it was necessary to have forces near by to fight or to accept surrender. All night long the chasers stood by; now and then the listeners reported scraping and straining noises from below, but these grew fainter and fainter, seeming almost to register the despair which must be seizing the hearts of the imprisoned Germans.

At three o'clock in the morning a British destroyer arrived and presently the two chasers returned from Penzance with more ammunition. Meanwhile, the weather had thickened, a fog had fallen, the lights on the buoy had gone out, and the buoy itself had been pulled under by the tide. The watching subchasers were tossed about by the weather, and lost the precise bearing of the sunken submarine. When daylight returned and the weather calmed down the chasers again put over their tubes and attempted to "fix" the U-boat. They listened for hours without hearing a sound ; but about five o'clock in the afternoon a sharp piercing noise came ringing over the wires. It was a sound that made the listeners' blood run cold.

Only one thing in the world could make a sound like that. It was the crack of a revolver. The first report had hardly stilled when another shot was heard; and then there were more in rapid succession. The listeners on two different chasers heard these pistol cracks and counted them ; the reports which these two men independently made agreed in every detail. In all, twenty-five shots came from the bottom of the sea. As there were from twenty-five to thirty men in a submarine crew the meaning was all too evident. The larger part of officers and men, finding themselves shut tightly in their coffin of steel, had resorted to that escape which was not uncommonly availed of by German submarine crews in