This was about as much as the stunned submarine could stand, and forging ahead she suddenly submerged and sank stern first, but a few seconds later she rose to the surface with a heavy list to starboard, and then sank for good and all. For, on submerging, she had found she was leaking so badly that her condition was hopeless, and she was doubtless intending to surrender, but apparently the fourth shot from _Stonecrop_ had so damaged the conning-tower hatch that it could not be opened. Thus there perished U 88, but this was more than the sinking of an ordinary submarine, for with her there went to his doom Lieut.-Commander Schwieger, who, when in command of U 20, had sunk the _Lusitania_ on May 7, 1915, with the loss of over eleven hundred men, women, and children. Altogether _Stonecrop’s_ action had been very neat. He had lured the enemy into a short range, utterly fooled him, and then disabled him before he woke up. For this service Commander Blackwood received the D.S.O., and three R.N.R. lieutenants and a naval warrant officer each received a D.S.C. But Q-ship life was always full of uncertainties, for on the very next day _Stonecrop_ was herself torpedoed by another submarine at 1 p.m., though fortunately this was in a position a little nearer the coast. Two officers and twenty survivors were picked up by a motor-launch of the Auxiliary Patrol and landed at Berehaven; sixty-four men in one boat and a raft were remaining behind, but all available craft were sent out to rescue them. The employment of small coasting steamers was, during the last phase of the war, more and more developed. What the Q-ship captain liked was that the enemy should attack him not with torpedoes but with gunfire. Now, even the biggest German submarines carried usually not more than ten torpedoes, and inasmuch as his cruise away from any base lasted weeks, and, in the case of the _Deutschland_ class, even months, it was obvious that the U-boat had to conserve his torpedoes for those occasions which were really worth while. From this it follows that a submarine captain who knew his work, and was anxious to make a fine haul before ending his cruise, would not, as a rule, waste his torpedoes on a 500-ton steamer when he might have secured much bigger tonnage by using the same missile against a 20,000-ton liner.