When they had regained their feet the crew went back to their allotted stations to await orders. There was no need for them to puzzle why their craft was in this predicament. Neither a sunken wreck nor a submerged rock goes off with a bang. Meanwhile, there were some nasty leaks to divert the mind. They would be attended to later, when orders had been given. Discipline, like explosive, is a mighty force. The commander picked himself up, carefully brushed his uniform with his hands, and went to his post. “Let all things be done decently and in order” is the acknowledged, if unwritten, motto of British submarines. The officer’s action was the outward and visible sign that he had not forgotten it. He gave instructions for the pumps to be set in motion—if they were capable of movement. Everything depended on the answer. There were moments of tense anxiety before it came. No one, even the bravest of the brave, likes to be drowned like a rat in a trap. The motors were going. They had not stopped. But the pumps? They started! With the beating of their pulse hope flowed in where before it had been on the ebb. The submarine came to the surface as game as ever, though terribly bruised. If “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” a kindly Providence most assuredly watched over this craft. In enemy waters, three hundred odd miles from home, with a broken nose and internal injuries, she had not too much strength for the journey. She accomplished it satisfactorily enough, and was back again in her old haunts within a few weeks. There is a particularly poignant note of tragedy in a strange mishap that befell another British submarine. The why and the wherefore of the accident have now been revealed. She was on her trials, and the ventilating shafts had been left open, flooding the rear compartments and drowning thirty-one men. She took an unexpected plunge of thirty-eight feet, stuck fast in the mud, and positively refused to budge. She lay like a dead thing. Every conceivable means of resurrection was tried; each failed. One has read of wonderful life-saving devices that are supposed to be donned by submarine men when their boat is in difficulties. They look like smoke-helmets. All that is required is to don one of these affairs, enter the conning-tower, open the lid, and pop up like a cork. It sounds simple, even entertaining, and might be introduced as a side show at an exhibition as a change from the Flip-Flap. Whatever other submarines may have of this kind, this particular boat either did not possess or could not use.