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Better still: no chance of damaging the periscope. There's Gedge !" "Ha! Ha! Ha! Hee! Hee! Hee! I see you, but you can't see me!" He slewed the periscope through a few points and back to the original position. "Hullo!" he said presently, "what's he up to? He's altered course.... Thinks he sees something, I suppose. You're wrong, my lad. We're not in that direction." The minutes passed in silence.
"Yes, sir, I think he did a larger submarine, without any conning-tower and the old-fashioned periscope. They have seven thousand miles' cruising radius, enough to cross the Pacific."
It was like looking at a picture a moving picture and all was beautifully distinct. Our commander consulted a card, decided the speed of the warship, and then again propped his head against the reflector. "Raise periscope," ordered the two-striper.
"Go easy, won't you?" he said to me. "Bosche has an idea we use this corner for something rather important. If he sees your camera we shall certainly receive his attention. For Heaven's sake, keep your head down." "Right-o!" I said. "Lend me your periscope; I will have a look at the ground first through that." I looked on the village, or rather the late site of it.
It was a moment to stir the pulses of the two Brighton recruits. Wide-eyed in wonder, tense with the strain of the experience, they stepped back from the periscope. Through Ted's mind flitted memories of Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and he was suddenly inspired to find out whether it was possible to glimpse any of the wonders depicted by the writer.
Obeying orders implicitly, Ted was strapping on the life-preserver. "Ready?" called McClure. Ted saluted. "Right -go!" shouted the commander of the Dewey. To Ted it seemed as though he were following the mandate of some madman as he emerged from the conning tower and, grasping the periscope pole, steadied himself a moment before leaping down on deck.
Then the plate dropped from his hand, and a strange, cold feeling came over him. "Who are you?" he gasped, his eyes stark and staring. "I I didn't know I ain't " He stopped, refusing to believe, and groped for the precious mess plate, part of the makeshift periscope which his own keenness had discovered and rendered useless.
So it was in our mess where war correspondents and censors sat down together after futile journeys to dirty places to see a bit of shell-fire, a few dead bodies, a line of German trenches through a periscope, a queue of wounded men outside a dressing station, the survivors of a trench raid, a bombardment before a "minor operation," a trench-mortar "stunt," a new part of the line... Verdun was the only thing that mattered in March and April until France had saved herself and all of us.
At length those on the bridge were able to make out the periscope of the vessel, close to the water. And at this very moment it stood higher and higher in the water. The submarine was coming to the surface. The Sylph had been quickly stripped for action, for Lord Hastings had determined to give battle should the submarine prove to be an enemy.
The Germans, by the way, have had the "edge" on the Allies in the matter of sniping, as in almost all lines of artillery and musketry practice. The Boche sniper is nearly always armed with a periscope-telescope rifle. This is a specially built super-accurate rifle mounted on a periscope frame.
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