"It was a good deal of a relief to find that, badly buckled as some of the plates were, she wasn't making any more water aft than the pumps could easily take care of. That was the first thing I looked after, and the next was the U-boat; or rather, we were looking out for both at the same time. If there was one thing more than another that helped to reconcile me to the double disappointment of missing my crack at the Hun and knocking my own ship out, it was the fact which soon became apparent, that Fritz never knew about the latter. If he _had_ known the shape I was in, he could have finished me off a dozen times over during the hour or more the '----' was lying helpless, and before the first armed trawler showed up in answer to my S.O.S. Just why he didn't, I could never make quite sure, but the chances are it was one or both of two things. It is quite possible that the biff from the depth-charge--which must still have been almost as near to him as it was to me when it exploded--may have done the submarine really serious injury, perhaps even sinking it. We never found any evidence, however, that this had been the case. Whether he was damaged or not, there is no doubt that his close call gave him a bad scare. There could have been nothing in the explosion to tell him that it did any harm to his enemy, and, since he did not have his periscope up, there was no way he could see what had happened. Doubtless expecting another 'can' any moment, and knowing well that it would be only a matter of an hour or two until there would be a lot more craft joining in the chase, it is probable that he followed the tactics which you can always count on a U-boat following when it knows a hunt is on--that is, to submerge deeply and lose no time in making itself just as scarce as possible in the neighbourhood where the hue-and-cry has started. That's the only way I can account for the fact that this particular pirate didn't have a revenge after his own Hunnish heart. We were about evenly matched for guns probably, and doubtless I would have had rather better than an even break on that score, because a surface craft can stand more holing than a submarine. But there was nothing to prevent his taking a sneaking sight through his periscope from a safe distance and then slipping a mouldie at us, which, helpless as we were for a while, there would have been no way of avoiding. A moving ship of almost any class, provided it has a gun to make him keep his distance, has a good fighting chance of saving herself from being torpedoed by the proper use of her helm; a disabled ship, though she has all the guns in the world, has no show if the Fritz really thinks she's worth wasting two or three torpedoes on. If he has his nerve, and any luck at all, he ought to finish the job with one.