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"Yes," answered Milsom; "and what I have learned is not very comforting. That torpedo boat, it appears, is practically a new craft, and she has a sea speed of twenty-five knots, which is one knot better than our best; so how we are going to dodge her is more than I at present know.
A squadron supplied with such boats to be used to attack, after the fight began, and the ships were enveloped in smoke, would have a most decided advantage against an enemy not thus armed for torpedo warfare. It is reported that our torpedo navy will consist of twenty vessels, none of which will have a less speed than twelve knots, and the fastest of them will go seventeen knots."
But it was nothing to what was to follow. In the late fall of that year Emil Gluck made a clean sweep of the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Florida. Nothing escaped. Forts, mines, coast defences of all sorts, torpedo stations, magazines everything went up. Three months afterward, in midwinter, he smote the north shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Greece in the same stupefying manner.
"A leak! Gracious king! He's like a torpedo blow-up under the engine-room. The bank'll sink if he stays aboard another month, I do believe. And yet," he added, with a shake of the head, "I don't see but he'll have to stay; there ain't another available candidate for the job in sight.
"I do not make bargains," Denzil replied, his calm come back by this time. "I came here to tender you a suggestion. It struck me that you might offer me a fiver for my trouble. Should you do so, I shall not refuse it." "You shall not refuse it if you deserve it." "Good. I will come to the point at once. My suggestion concerns Tom Mortlake." Denzil threw out the name as if it were a torpedo.
"We'll get a chance at a sub maybe," said another more hopefully. "No such luck," growled the first speaker. "We'll just about get shot at with a torpedo from one of those pirates. We'd never have the good luck to plant a shell in a U-boat where it would do the most good. No, sir!"
Be it whim or emergency, the modern laboratory is equally at the service of romance, equally ready to gratify mankind with a torpedo or a toy.
He invented a device so that they could smell a German submarine half a mile away, and they could tell when a torpedo was fired. Another invention turned a ship about with her prow facing the torpedo, so that it would be most likely to go plowing and not hit her, as it would with broadside on. I guess that saved many a ship and it helped to destroy lots of submarines with depth bombs.
A hunt was made for the hostile submarine by the British destroyers, but she was found by the British battleship Majestic; but before the British ship could fire a shot at the German submarine, the latter fired a torpedo that caught the battleship near her stern and sank her immediately.
It was such a trifling thing after all. I was bicycling very pleasantly down a country road to-day, when one of those small pungent beetles, a tiny thing, in black plate-armour, for all the world like a minute torpedo, sailed straight into my eye. The eyelid, quicker even than my own thought, shut itself down, but too late.
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