CHAPTER IX

At Zeebrugge

It would be no exaggeration to state that Alec Seton "had the wind up badly" when the U-boat dived suddenly. He knew what it meant right enough; only on this occasion the positions were reversed. Instead of being the hunter he was the hunted, and, what was worse--worse from a strictly personal point--he was being strafed by some of his own friends, men who, from long practice, had been uncannily adept in sending German submarines on their last, long voyage.

Had he been on board a British submarine, and had been chased by a pack of Hun torpedo-craft, he would have borne the situation with comparative calm, knowing that it was part of the game, and that both sides could hit unpleasantly hard. But, a captive in an enemy craft, unable to lift a finger to help himself, Seton had good cause for being in a mild state of funk.

It seemed to him that the U-boat was diving almost horizontally, for he slid heavily against the for'ard bulkhead. Then, with a disconcerting roll, the boat regained an even keel. Men were shouting, hand-wheels and levers were being manipulated with undisciplined haste. There was no doubt about it: Fritz was having a sticky time, and taking his medicine badly.

Then came the muffled detonation of M.-L. 4452's depth charge. The U-boat, caught by the underwater undulations, rolled and pitched alarmingly. Gear was carried away, and clattered noisily across the steel platforms, the electric lights went out, water began to hiss in--fine but high-pressured jets through the buckled plates and started rivet-holes. In the darkness there was no telling whether the U-boat was plunging to the bed of the North Sea.

A sudden impulse prompted Seton to thrust his shoulder against the steel door. In calmer moments he might have reflected upon the needlessness of it. If he had to drown, he might just as well remain in solitude as spend his last moments in the company of a crew of panic-stricken Huns.

The door resisted the impact, but unaccountably the lock gave. Stumbling over the raised threshold, the Sub found himself brought up against a number of complicated valve wheels and tubes. There he hung on and waited.

Already some of the crew had produced electric torches. The pumps were set to work to keep the slight but none the less dangerous influx of water under control. Von Kloster, his eyes fixed upon the depth gauge, was bellowing out orders, while the unter-leutnant was feverishly attending to the wheel operating the horizontal rudders. Right aft, the sweating engineers were trying to coax the electrically-driven engines into action.

By degrees the Huns, realizing that they were not immediately going on a visit to Davy Jones, began to calm down. A petty officer, making his way aft, flashed his torch upon Alec. The latter, still clad in the dinghy canvas suit, was easily mistaken for one of the crew, for the petty officer, pointing for'ard, gave a curt order.

Seton had not the faintest notion of what the Hun said, but the gesture was unmistakable. Entering into the fun of the affair, the Sub, squeezing through a small oval-shaped aperture in one of the transverse bulkheads, found himself in the bow torpedo-room.

At that moment, the artificers having renewed the blown-out fuse-wires, the electric lamps were lighted. Alec was alone in the compartment. In front of him were the twin torpedo-tubes, which differed from the British ones in one important detail. Instead of the breech piece being secured by six butterfly nuts, the German method was to employ an intercepted thread cam-action, similar to the breech-block mechanism of a quick-firing gun. Above the tubes were six oiled steel torpedoes, each ready to be "launched home" into the tubes.

"By Jove! What an opportunity!" thought Alec, giving a cursory glance to reassure himself that he was alone. "A gorgeous chance to do the dirty on Fritz!"

Picking up a heavy adjustable spanner, Seton set to work quickly and deftly. To each of the rudders of the torpedoes he gave a slight and almost imperceptible twist. In the excitement of launching home and firing the deadly missiles, the Hun torpedo men would almost to a certainty overlook the slight but important bend in the delicately adjusted metal fins.

"Good enough!" declared Alec. He felt like a schoolboy engaged in ragging an unpopular fellow's study. It was time to make himself scarce before his presence was detected.

His luck was in. Without encountering anyone he regained his cell and closed the door.

"Now Fritz can use his tin-fish as often as he likes," he thought gleefully. "He's welcome to puzzle his brains to find out why the blessed things won't run true, for it's a dead cert. they won't."

It was a matter of three or four hours before the U-boat again rose to the surface. Her batteries were running low. If again obliged to submerge before regaining her base she would be compelled to rest helplessly on the bottom of the sea, since her underwater propulsion powers were almost nil.

When the sailor reappeared with Alec's unappetizing meal--black bread, acorn coffee, and sausage of doubtful origin--the German looked suspiciously at the door.

"You haf with the lock played tricks," he declared.

"Must have been the concussion," said Alec. "It was a nasty shock, wasn't it?"

The fellow scowled with sullen anger.

"Schweinhund Englander," he muttered. "I go tell der kapitan."

He put the food upon the floor and went to the door. Then, half turning, he inquired:

"Vot you give me, if I not tell der kapitan?"

Seton laughed outright. His sense of humour was tickled.

"Carry on, Fritz!" he replied. "It's your German temperament, I suppose. You can't help it. So put that in your pipe and smoke it."

The Hun looked puzzled.

"Put vot in mine pipe? Haf you any tobacco?" he asked almost pleadingly.

"'Fraid you can't understand, Fritz," rejoined Seton. "You'll get nothing more out of me, so hook it!"

The man went out still puzzling over the idiomatic expression that Alec had purposely employed. Yet he did not report the incident of the tampered lock to the kapitan. A little later an artificer came and secured the door, and once more Seton was a close prisoner.

With her pumps going continuously to keep under the steady inflow of water--for, in spite of "stoppers" and patches applied to the gaping plates, she leaked badly--the U-boat passed between the ends of the moles and entered Zeebrugge Harbour. Owing to injuries she had sustained, it was considered desirable to pass through the lock gates and take her up the Bruges Canal for repairs. Although the locality was not a healthy one, there was less risk of the U-boat being smashed by British guns or bombs than had she remained at Zeebrugge. Accordingly the returned pirate craft was temporarily berthed alongside the Mole in order to land certain members of her crew and also spare stores before proceeding.

Count Otto von Brockdorff-Giespert was the first to step ashore. There was a smile of satisfaction on his face: he made no attempt to conceal his joy at leaving the badly-strained U-boat, and he mentally vowed that, if the matter were left to him, it would be a long time before he went on a voyage again. He would be quite content to exercise his valuable submarine knowledge ashore, and let the U-boat commanders put his theories to the test.

Two-thirds of the crew, including Unter-leutnant Kaspar Diehardt, also landed. They showed little enthusiasm on their stolid faces, for they knew perfectly well that there was no respite for them. Owing to the shortage of skilled submariners, they would be promptly drafted to other U-boats, and be sent to sea again on their ruthless and inglorious task of attempting to wipe out of existence the British Mercantile Marine. Practically all the German submarine service suffered in the same way. Constantly employed, exposed to perils seen and unseen, ill-fed on very inferior food the men were already on the high-road to mutiny.

Guarded by a couple of armed men, Sub-lieutenant Alec Seton was taken ashore. Still clad in the loaned canvas suit and carrying his saturated uniform in a bundle under his arm, Seton set foot for the first time upon the now historic Zeebrugge Mole.

He made good use of his eyes during his progress. It was part of his training to do so. He had seen aerial photographs of the place, but these, useful though they were, conveyed but a slight idea of the formidable nature of the German defences.

The stone wall, rising full thirty feet above low water-mark, was of massive construction. It had been additionally protected by concrete works and thousands of sand-bags. There were emplacements for heavy guns by the dozen, and for quick-firers by the hundred, while machine-guns bristled everywhere. There were plenty of evidences of the activity of the British guns and aeroplanes, for the wall had been repaired in fifty different places. Some of the havoc played by bombs was of recent origin, men, both Belgian and German, being employed to make good the damage. Almost abreast of the berth where the returned U-boat was lying was a hole twenty feet in diameter, and perhaps a dozen feet deep, while the wall on the seaward side was bulging ominously under the strain.

At intervals, beneath the level of the outside parapet, several block-houses had been built on the Mole, machine-guns commanding the roadway on the breakwater. Evidently the Huns expected a landing, and with true Teutonic thoroughness were taking precautions accordingly.

Within the harbour were swarms of small craft of all types--ocean-going torpedo-boats, patrol-boats, submarines, lighters, suction-dredgers, captured merchantmen, and paddle-wheelers. All, more or less, showed signs of being badly mauled, for, almost daily, British sea-planes swarmed overhead and let the Huns know that they meant to make things hot for the pirates' nest.

At the present moment the guns were silent. Nevertheless, it was easy to see that Fritz was on thorns. Above the town floated four observation balloons; a Black Cross aeroplane flew discreetly along the sea-front, ready to hark back to its hangar on the first sign of the dreaded British sea-planes. From an elevated wooden tower on the extremity of the Mole, signalmen, brought specially from Kiel, swept the horizon with their telescopes. Anti-aircraft gunners were continually standing by, while in bomb-proof shelters artillerymen awaited telephonic orders to man their guns, should a 17-inch salvo from the monitors beyond the horizon announce that yet another strafe was beginning.

Against the base of the parapet were bundles of barbed wire, one end of which was securely fixed to stout ring-bolts in the granite wall. On the inner edge of the Mole were massive iron posts, each post being abreast a corresponding roll of wire. This was a part of the German defences, for at night the wire was stretched across the Mole roadway, forming twenty or more barriers, in which narrow gaps were left to enable men to move to and fro. These barbed-wire defences were augmented by live wires, the whole forming a truly formidable obstacle should any attempt be made to storm the Mole.

All this Seton was freely permitted to see. His captors intended that he should do so, otherwise they would have bandaged his eyes. It was part of von Brockdorff-Giespert's scheme. Confident in his belief that the prisoner would never leave Zeebrugge until the conclusion of a victorious German peace, the Count spared no pains to humiliate and intimidate his captive.

Presently the guards halted at a distance of less than eighty yards from the head of the Mole. Here was an abandoned big-gun emplacement. The seaward aperture had partly collapsed, leaving a gap of about four feet in width and two in height. This had been prevented from completely caving in by several thick steel bars fixed at four-inch intervals, the whole forming an impassable grille. The gun had been removed from the emplacement, leaving a space of twenty-five feet by twelve, and eight feet between the stone floor and the steel-girdered and concrete reinforced roof. The door was of steel, and furnished with three slits for rifle-fire. Within was a plank-bed with a straw mattress, a wooden stool, a shelf holding tin plates and cups, and a couple of blankets. This was Alec Seton's cell.

"Evidently the old brigand is keeping his word," thought the Sub as he was roughly bidden to enter and the door locked upon him. "He said he'd leave me to the attentions of our bombing 'planes and long-range guns. Ah, well! It's no use moaning about it. Make the best of a bad job, Alec, my boy, and keep a stiff upper lip. Many a man's been in a tighter hole than this before to-day and has lived to tell the tale. Never say die till you're dead."

And, with a series of similar trite maxims running through his head, Seton prepared to shake down in his new abode as a guest of the Imperial German Government.