Previous pages have had much to say about U-boats. The northern mists, from the obscurity of which the Grand Fleet occasionally emerged into the broad sunlight of publicity, were as nothing compared with the fog of war which veiled the hourly activities of British and Allied submarines. Scouting is notoriously hazardous and necessarily private. Our underseas craft had sufficient of it. In the performance of this task they also tackled much other business, tracked and sent to the bottom vessels of their own species though not of their own tribe, wormed their way through waters sealed to surface ships, ferreted a course through strings of floating mines, dodged unanchored infernal machines, convoyed in safety hundreds of thousands of troops, and stalked men-of-war. They proved themselves friends to all but the Ishmael of the seas; and when opportunity served they snatched him from a watery grave when he ought to have perished. The first German warship to be sunk by a British submarine was the _Hela_. She fell to E 9 on the 13th September, 1914. Heaven knows it was not for lack of searching for legitimate prey that nothing had been secured by our underwater craft ere the second month of the war. Like Villeneuve’s ships before Trafalgar, if any German vessels occasionally took an airing they also took good care to keep near home. The _Hela_, a light cruiser of 2040 tons displacement, with a complement of 178, of little consequence for fighting purposes because her heaviest guns were 15½-pdrs., was only six miles south of Heligoland when she was torpedoed by Lieutenant-Commander Max K. Horton. E 9, it may be well to note, had already won her spurs in the prelude to the battle of Heligoland Bight. Two torpedoes were fired, with an interval of fifteen seconds between. One hit. Greatly daring, about a quarter of an hour later Horton took just the suspicion of a glance in her direction through the periscope, and saw that she was heeling over to starboard. When he again ventured to use his ‘eye’ there was no _Hela_, and a trawler had gone to the rescue of her crew. “What we are so proud about is that it is the first torpedo fired from a [British] submarine that made a hit,” one of the crew wrote, “and it has been a great competition among all our boats to get first one in, and of course we consider ourselves ‘the cock of the submarine flotilla’ now.”