The Submarine lay motionless on the surface with the waves breaking over the hog-backed hull. Every now and again a few drops of spray splashed over the surface of the chart, and the Naval man wiped them off with a scrap of lace and cambric that had once been a lady's handkerchief. He had a way with women, that German Oberleutnant. Nothing was in sight: not a tendril of smoke showed above the arc of tumbling waves that ringed the limit of his vision; the sun was warm and pleasant, and the figure on the conning-tower crossed his legs, encased in heavy thigh boots, and gave himself over to retrospective thought. There had been a time when Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet possessed the rudiments of a conscience. It could never have been described as acutely sensitive, and it never developed much beyond the rudimentary stage. Nevertheless, it had existed once: and in the early days of the war it was still sufficiently active to record certain protests and objections in his mind. The mysterious forces that were at work in Germany, industriously remoulding, brutalising and distorting the mind of Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet, together with millions of others, had not been blind to the prejudicial effects of conscience to an evil cause. Imperial rodomontade and the inflammatory German Admiralty War Orders had deliberately rejected, one by one, the deep-seated principles of humanity and chivalry in war. It had been done gradually and systematically--scientifically, in fact, and in the majority of cases it succeeded in producing a state of atrophy of the moral sense that was altogether admirable--from a German point of view. In the case of Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet, however, these early qualms had a trick of recurring. They pricked his consciousness at unexpected moments, like a grass-seed in a walker's stocking.... And now, as he sat swinging his legs in the warm June sunlight, a whole procession of such reflections trooped through his mind. For instance, there arose in his intelligence an obstinate doubt as to whether the torpedoing without warning of a liner carrying women and children at the commencement of the war had been quite within the pale of legitimate Naval warfare. He had met the man who boasted such an achievement, and for a long time he carried with him the recollection of that man's eyes as they met his above a beer mug. They had drunk uproariously together, and von Sperrgebiet heard all about it first hand, and even fingered enviously the Iron Cross upon the breast of the teller of the tale. But somehow those eyes had told quite a different story: and it was that which von Sperrgebiet remembered long after the wearer of the Iron Cross had gone out into the North Sea mists and returned no more. Then there had been the rather unpleasant business of the boat....