"The first round, fired at three hundred yards, was an 'over' by a narrow margin, but the second, at two hundred yards, was a clean hit on the conning-tower, carrying away the periscope and the stays supporting it. The explosion of this shell appeared to split the whole superstructure of the conning-tower, from the bridge to the deck. I did not see anyone on the bridge at this moment, and if there had been he must certainly have been killed. The fact 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 grâce_. 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.