United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At his bidding a sailor fetched the lead line and took a sounding. Together they examined the tallow at the bottom of the lead, and von Sperrgebiet made a prolonged scrutiny of the chart. "H'm'm!" he said. "I don't understand." Submerging again, they progressed at slow speed for some hours and he took another sounding. The sky was overcast and no sights could be taken.
This time von Sperrgebiet returned from comparing the sounding with the chart, wearing a distinctly worried expression. The hawk-eyed seaman beside him on the bridge gave an ejaculation and pointed ahead. "Land, Herr Kapitan!" he said. "Fool!" replied his Captain. "Idiot! How can there be land there unless" he glanced inside the binnacle half contemptuously "unless the compasses are mad or I am."
A revolver bullet crashed through the glass window of the wheel-house; von Sperrgebiet had an instant's vision of a round face, purple with rage, above the spokes of the wheel, and then the conning tower's automatic hatchway closed. The Submarine was in diving trim, and she submerged in the shortest time on record.
It concerns a promise" he lowered his voice till it was barely audible above the noise of the machinery "to my betrothed." For the first time von Sperrgebiet turned his face from the rubber eye-piece and regarded the youth with a little mocking smile that showed only a sharp dog-tooth. "Don't say you promised to introduce her to me, Ludwig!" he sneered. "No, no," said the other hastily.
"Amen!" said Oberleutnant Otto von Sperrgebiet. The boat had been travelling in a wide circle after the torpedo left the tube, and ten minutes later the Oberleutnant cautiously raised the periscope. The next moment he swung the wheel round again in the opposite direction. "Another ship?" asked Ludwig. "Yes," replied von Sperrgebiet. "One of their cursed Armed Merchant Cruisers."
Von Sperrgebiet took the clock and the sugar plums. But even Submarine warfare against unarmed shipping has its risks. There was the ever-memorable incident of the British tug, and even now von Sperrgebiet winced at the recollection.
"There is something fouling our propeller, Herr Kapitan," he shouted. "The engines are labouring at full speed, but we are scarcely making any headway. The cut-outs have fused." Von Sperrgebiet cursed under his breath. "Stop the engines," he said. "If we can't swim we must sink." He gave the necessary orders and the boat dropped gradually through the water till she rested on the bottom.
Von Sperrgebiet had given orders for the boat to be sunk by gunfire, but somehow the memory of that stark figure at the helm persisted. Try as he would, he failed to banish from his mind the staring, sightless eyes and grey, famished face.... Altogether it was an unpleasant business. Other memories of this nature came and went with the smoke from his cigarette.
Nothing was in sight: not a tendril of smoke showed above the arc of tumbling waves that ringed the limit of his vision; the sun was warm and pleasant, and the figure on the conning-tower crossed his legs, encased in heavy thigh boots, and gave himself over to retrospective thought. There had been a time when Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet possessed the rudiments of a conscience.
In the case of Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet, however, these early qualms had a trick of recurring. They pricked his consciousness at unexpected moments, like a grass-seed in a walker's stocking.... And now, as he sat swinging his legs in the warm June sunlight, a whole procession of such reflections trooped through his mind.
Word Of The Day