This one was hit amidships--bam!--and amidships is a bad place for a destroyer to be hit--her big engine and boiler-room compartment lie amidships. This one of ours was hit so hard that nobody aboard ever thought she would stay up. She did go down till her deck was flush with the water's edge, but there she stayed; and her crew, climbing back aboard, took a hawser from the sloop-of-war, which towed her back to port. She was a fine heartening sight coming in. If she could come back, why worry about minor mishaps? One of them--the 343 say--had performed her duty, which was to see a small convoy to a point well on toward a large port, and was returning to the naval base. She was in no great rush, and, it happening to be smooth water, which is a rare thing up this way at this time of the year, she stopped for a little needed gun practice. There was no more thought than usual of U-boats. Nobody would have been surprised if one popped up--it was a coast where they had been regularly operating--but no one was particularly expecting one. Destroyers are bad medicine if you do not get to them quickly, and lately the U-boats seemed to care more to get merchant ships; but this day the lookouts were not loafing on their job on that account. The 343 got through with her target practice, and, except for a few gunners' mates still coddling their pet guns, the crew were taking it easy around deck; and also, because of the smooth sea, the ship was making easy weather of it toward port. Seeing a periscope is oftentimes a matter of luck. When they stay up it is easy enough, but when they are porpoising, shooting it up for just a look around, you have to be looking right at one. What they first saw on the 343 was the wake of this torpedo, coming on at a forty-knot clip for the waist of the ship. The commander of the 343 was on the bridge at the time and saw the wake almost with the cry of the lookout. The wake was then pretty handy to the ship, and the torpedo itself would be fifty feet or so ahead of the wake. There was no getting away from it then. The only hope was to take it somewhere else than amidships. Engine and boiler compartments were amidships. If it struck her there they might as well call it taps for all hands. So the commander put the wheel hard over--to take it on his quarter, where there was also a chance that it would pass under her. Torpedoes generally strike twelve to fifteen feet under water, but just before this one could make the 343 it broached--came to the surface of the water--but without slacking her forty-knot speed. It was unusual and spectacular. The sun shone on the polished sides of her as she leaped from the sea.