Their action was certainly less desperate than the means adopted by the officers and men of a German mine-laying submarine which grounded on the French coast to the west of Calais. She ‘touched bottom’ at high tide, the worst possible time to choose for such a performance, and remained as immovable as a rock. At daybreak the coastguards saw the boat lying like a stranded whale, and promptly secured her. The officers and men offered no resistance. They had made their plans when they realized that the ‘game was up.’ By flooding the submarine with inflammable oil and applying a match they effectively prevented the boat from passing into the service of the French Navy. Occasionally the hunter got more than he bargained for and was ‘hoist with his own petard.’ The pirate commander of a U-boat was congratulating himself on having disposed of a British steamer with the minimum of trouble, when the victim blew up. He had attacked a vessel loaded with ammunition without knowing what was in her hold, and at comparatively short range. The explosion was so violent that it upset the stability of the submersible, and did so much damage in other ways that for a time it was believed she would founder. She was a sorry spectacle when the cliffs and frowning guns of Heligoland were sighted through the periscope. In the early days of submarines their constitution could only be described as delicate. At each stage of progress the craft has taken on strength, until it has now anything but a fragile frame. That was one of the reasons why the British Admiralty was chary of issuing definite statements as to U-boat losses. Oil rising to the surface might be a sign that a submarine had been wounded, but was no definite guarantee that the patient would bleed to death. U-boats had a little trick of letting out oil when attacked in the hope that it would deceive the enemy. Take the case of a certain British submarine which had the very undesirable misfortune to barge into a German mine. These submerged canisters were filled with a heavy charge of trotyl. You will better appreciate what this means when I add that T.N.T. has a bursting force when confined of 128,000 lb. per square inch. Yet this British-built ship is still afloat, and her crew alive to tell the tale. Vessel and men owed their escape from death to a mighty good bulkhead. She struck the mine bow on. Bulkheads 1 and 2 were burst open; her two fore torpedo-tubes, both loaded, were so twisted and jammed that they were rendered useless; the glass of the dials of the various recording instruments was scattered in all directions; every member of the crew was knocked flat, and the vessel sent to the bottom, nose foremost. A landsman would have said it was the end of all things; the men most concerned merely admitted that it was ‘a nasty jar.’