An instant report by the sailor of what he had done, and a general movement of the boats away, would have saved the situation; but the sailor did not rise to the occasion. His home was in far-distant Hanover, and he started for it and demobilisation as fast as he could run. Punctually to time the mine exploded violently, and the half-flotilla was suddenly reduced in numbers. The enemy also suffered from a very touchy pistol which they introduced for the war-heads of their torpedoes. It was a very good pistol for service, as it went off unfailingly on contact with our ships, but it had the disadvantage of doing the same thing aboard German submarines if they pitched heavily in a seaway, which made it rather unpopular and led to its modification. This type of torpedo pistol is thought by the Germans to have caused the loss of the light cruiser _Karlsruhe_, which unaccountably blew up off the coast of South America in 1915. A U-boat was certainly lost in Kiel from this cause, a torpedo having slid forward in the tube until it touched the outer door, when it at once exploded. That sort of case explains why, in night encounters at short range between British and German submarines, our enemies never tried to use the ram; with the same kind of hair-trigger explosives in our tubes we would have been equally cautious. I want to tell some stories about submarine sailors here, but there are such hundreds of incidents to record that it is impossible to tell many. In despatches of submarine captains describing successes against the enemy, one sees almost every time: "The whole crew having carried out their duties calmly and admirably, it is impossible for me to recommend any particular men for decoration...." But I remember an incident near the Hiorns Reef Light Vessel, when a boat approached a suspicious trawler and dived past her to investigate--finding that the suspected gun in the bows was in reality a spar on the capstan, the boat "dipped" to seventy feet to turn away; but owing to the trawler altering course as she did so, dived right into the trawl net and hung up in it. It seeming extremely probable that the net was a real submarine-catching device, and that the trawler was hostile, it was decided to wait a while before rising, in order that ammunition, etc., might be prepared at the conning-tower foot, and general frightfulness arranged for the expected fight on the surface. Meanwhile, with her motors stopped, the boat was towed along in the net, taking extraordinary angles every way, and generally acting like a trapped salmon. When ready, the tanks were blown, and the boat rose with a rush, breaking surface in a festoon of net and wires close under the trawler's stern. The gun's crew jumped to their stations, riflemen lay down on the bridge deck, and a petty officer with an axe started to chop away the wires that were holding the boat. It was desirable, owing to the presence of a distant Zeppelin, to get clear and dive again as