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Updated: June 12, 2025
He bent over the chart table for a minute and gave an order to the helmsman. "A fresh attack?" queried the Second-in-Command eagerly. Von Sperrgebiet returned to the periscope. "When you have been at this work as long as I have," he replied, "you will find it healthier not to meddle with Armed Merchant Cruisers. They are all eyes and they shoot straight.
The Second-in-Command leaned against a stanchion and wiped his face with his handkerchief. A minute passed, and a dull concussion shook the boat from stem to stern. Von Sperrgebiet showed his dog-tooth in that terrible mirthless smile of his. "A hit, my little Ludwig!" he said. The Second-in-Command clicked his heels together. "For the honour of the Fatherland," he said. "Gott strafe England!"
His calm, direct gaze never left her face, and after a moment he squared his big shoulders with an abrupt, characteristic movement. "Then he is the luckiest man," he said quietly, "that ever won God's most perfect gift." He gave her a funny stiff little inclination of the head and walked away. Otto von Sperrgebiet did not raise the periscope above the surface again for some hours.
Von Sperrgebiet glanced at the compass and moved to the eye-piece of the periscope. For a while there was silence, broken only by the hum of the motors. The Second-in-Command hung about the elbow of the motionless figure at the periscope like a morbid-minded urchin on the outskirts of a crowd that gathers round a street accident, but can see nothing.
Von Sperrgebiet caught a glimpse of the ship's name on the bows of the boat: it happened to be that of a neutral ship he had torpedoed at the beginning of the previous week during a gale. The German Admiralty Orders of that period contained a clause to the effect that ships were not to be torpedoed without ensuring the adequate safety of the crew.
Oberleutnant Otto von Sperrgebiet, of the Imperial German Navy, sat on the edge of a Submarine's conning-tower with a chart open on his knees, and smoked a cigarette. It was not a brand he cared about particularly, but it had been looted from the Captain's cabin of a neutral cargo steamer on the previous afternoon.
The Submarine, entirely submerged, drove through the water until night. After nightfall they travelled on the surface until the first pale bars of dawn appeared in the eastern sky. Von Sperrgebiet was on the conning-tower as soon as it was light, searching the horizon with his glasses. "It is strange," he said to his Second-in-Command. "We ought to have sighted that light vessel before now."
The announcement was not an unfamiliar one to Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet: they usually were young and pretty when he heard that hot rage in a man's voice. Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet made himself scarce forthwith, it might be almost said, from force of habit.... The glass was falling, and it was in mid-Atlantic that they left that boat.
But somehow those eyes had told quite a different story: and it was that which von Sperrgebiet remembered long after the wearer of the Iron Cross had gone out into the North Sea mists and returned no more. Then there had been the rather unpleasant business of the boat.... It was in mid-winter a long way North during one of the few calm days to be expected at that period of the year.
He raised his glasses to stare at the horizon. "You are right," he said. "You are right.... It is land." He gnawed his thumbnail as was his habit when in perplexity. The next moment the seaman pointed again. "The Hunters," he said. Von Sperrgebiet gave one glance ahead and kicked the man down through the open hatchway of the conning-tower. He himself followed, and the hatch closed.
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