14 
Land & Water 
April 4, 191 8 
— if it happens at a time when there isn't an opportunity to 
wind in and let him down easy — I'm afraid there won't be 
a one of his nine hves left in the little furry pan-cake it will 
make of him when he hits the water. It's surprising how 
the water will flatten out a — anything striking it at the end 
of a thousand-feet fall. Only week before last— — " 
To deflect the conversation to more cheering channels, 
I began to exclaim Sbout the view. And what a view it was ! 
The old "Xerxes " was lying well down towards one end of the 
mighty bay, so that without turning the head one could 
sweep the eyes over the single greatest unit of far-reaching 
might in the whole world-war, the Grand Fleet of the British 
Navy. And in no other way than in ascending in a balloon 
or a flying machine could one attain a vantag<^ from which the 
whole of the fleet could be seen. Ijooking from the loftiest 
fighting-top, from the highest hill of the islands, there was 
always a. point in the distance be)'ond which there was 
simply an amorphous slaty blur of ships melting into the 
loom of the encircling islands. But now those mysterious 
blurs were crystallising into definite lines of cleavage, and 
soon — save where some especia^lly fantastic ^^rick of camou- 
flage made one ship look like two in collision, or played some 
other equally scurvy trick on the vision — I could pick out not 
only battleships, but cruisers, destroj'ers, submarines, ranged 
class by class and row on row. Even the method in the 
apparent madness with which the swarms of supply ships, 
colliers, oilers, trawle«, and drifters were scattered about 
was discernible. 
An Average Day 
Save for the visibility, which was diamond-clear in the 
slanting Ught of the low-hanging winter sun, it was just an 
ordinary, average Grand Fleet day. A squadron of battle- 
ships was at target practice, and — even better than their own 
gun-control officers — we could- tally the foam-jets of the 
"wides" and "shorts" and the narrowing "straddles." A 
squadron of visiting battle-cruisers had just come to anchor 
and were swinging lazily round to the tide. Two of them 
bore names which had echoed to the ends of the world ; the 
names of two of the others — from their distinctive lines and 
great size, I recognised them as twin giants I had seen still 
in the slips on the Clyde scarcely a year previously — the 
world has never heard. A lean, swift scout-cruiser, with an 
absence of effort almost uncanny, was cleaving its way out 
toward the entrance just as a line of destroyers came scurry- 
ing in after the rolhng smoke-pall the following wind was 
driving on ahead of them. Out over the open seas to the 
east, across the hill-tops of the islands, dim bituminous dabs 
on the horizon heralded the return of a battleship squadron, 
the unceremonious deparijure of which two days previously 
had deprived me of the lalt two courses of my luncheon. In 
the air was another "kite" — floating indolently above a 
battleship at anchor — and a half-dozen circling aeroplanes 
and seaplanes. Countless drifters and launches shuttled 
in and out through the. evenly hned warships. 
We were now towing with the cable forming an angle of 
about si.xty degrees with the surface of the water, and running 
up to us straight over the port quarter. The ship had thinned 
down to an astonishingly slender sHver, not unsuggestive of 
a speeding arrow whose feathered shaft was represented by 
the foaming wake. 
"She's three or four points off the' wind," commented my 
companion, "and yet-^once we've steadied down — you see 
it doesn't make much difference in the weather we make of 
it. A head wind is desirable in getting up to keep from 
fouling the upper works amidships, but we, hardly need to 
figure it down to the last degree as in laimching a seaplane. 
When we're really trying to find something, of course, we 
have to work in any slant of wind that happens to be blowing. 
The worst condition is a wind from anywhere abaft the beam, 
blowing at a faster rate than the towing ship is moving 
through the water. In that case, the balloon simply drifts 
ahead to the end of its tether, swings around, and gives the 
ship a tow. If the wind is strong enough^say, forty miles 
an hour, with the ship doing twenty — to make her give a 
good steady pull on the cable, it is not so bad ; but when it 
is touch-and-go between ship and wind the poor old 'kite' 
is all over the shop, and about as difficult to work in as to 
ride in — which is saying a good deal." 
"What do you mean by work ?" I asked. 
"Looking out for things and reporting them to the ship 
over the telephone," was the reply. "Perhaps even trying 
to run them down and destroy them." 
" Can't we play at a bit of work now ? " I suggested. " Sup- 
posing we were at sea, and you saw what you thought to be 
the wake of the periscope of a U-boat a few miles away. 
What would you do ? " 
My companion laughed. "Well," he said, "if I had the old' 
" Xerxes " down there on the other end of the string, I should 
simply report the bearing and approximate distance of the 
periscope over the telephone, and let her do the rest." 
"And what would 'the rest' consist of?" I asked. 
"Principally of turning tail and running at top speed for 
the nearest protected waters," was the reply, "and inci- 
dentally 'broad-casting a wireless' giving position of the 
U-boat and the direction it was moving in." 
" But supposing it was a destroyer we had ' on the string ' ? " 
I persisted ; "and that you had no other present interest in 
the world beyond the finding of one of these little V-shaped 
ripples. The modus operandi would vary a bit in that case, 
wouldn't it ? " 
" Radically," he admitted. "I would give the destroyer 
what I figured was the shortest possible course to bring her 
into the vicinity of the U-boat. As long as the wake of the 
periscope was visible, I would correct that course from time 
to time by ordering so many degrees to port or to starboard, 
as the case might be. As soon as the periscope disappeared 
— which it would do, of course, just as soon as the eye at the 
bottom of it saw the ' kite ' — I would merely make a guess 
at the submarine's most likely course, and steer the destroyer 
te converge with that. Our success or failure would then 
hinge upon whether or not I could get my eye on the sub- 
marine where it lurked or was making off under water. In 
that event — provided only there was enough light left to 
work with-»-it would be long odds against that U-boat ever 
seeing Wilhelmshaven again. Just as you guide a horse by 
turning it to left or right at the tug of a rein, so, by giving 
the destroyer a course, now to one side, now to the other, 
until it was headed straight over its prey, I would guide the 
craft at the other end of the telephone-wire to a point from 
which a depth-charge could be dropped with telling effect. 
If the conditions were favourable, I might even be able to 
form a rough estimate of the distance of the U-boat beneath ' 
the' surface, to help in setting the hydrostat of the charge 
to explode at the proper depth. If the first shot fails to da 
the business, we have only to double back and let off another. 
Nothing but the coming of night or of a storm is likely 
to save that U-boat once we've spotted it. 
"Is it difficult to pick up a submarine under water?" 
I asked. 
"That depends largely upon the light and -the amount of 
sea running," was the reply. "Conditions are by no means 
so favourable as in the Mediterranean, but, at the same 
time, they are much better than in some other parts of the 
North Sea and the Atlantic. The condition of the surface 
of the water also has a lot to do with it. You can see a lot 
deeper when the sea is glassy smooth than when it is even 
slightly rippled. Waves tossed up enough to break into 
white-caps make it still harder to see far below the surface, 
while enough wind (as to-day) to throw a film of foam all 
over the water cuts off the view completely. On a smooth 
day, for instance, a drifter which lies on the bottom over 
there — deeper down than a U-boat is likely to go of its own 
free will — is fairly clearly defined from this height. To-day 
you couldn't find a sunk battleship there." 
I remarked on the fact that, in spite of the heavy wind, 
our basket was riding more steadily than that of any stationary 
observation balloon I had ever been up in at the front. "It 
'yaws' a bit," I observed, "but I have never been up in a 
balloon with less of that 'jig-a-jig' movement which makes 
it so hard to fix an object with your glasses." 
"The latest 'stabilisers' have just about eliminated the 
troublesome 'jig-a-jig,' " replied my companion. 
He turned to me with a grin. "You're in luck," he said. 
"Ship's heading up into the wind to let a seaplane go just 
as they're ready to wind us in. You'll learn, now, why 
they call one of these balloons a 'kite.' There they got 
Hold fast ! " 
There was a sudden side-winding jerk, and then that 
perfectly good seascape — Grand Fleet, Orkneys, the north 
end of Scotland, and all — was hashed up into something 
full of zigzag hnes hke a Futuristic masterpiece or the latest 
thing in "scientific camouflaging." My friends on the deck 
told me, afterwards, that the basket did nol "loop-the-loop," 
that it did not "jump through," "lie down," and "roll over" 
like a "clown" terrier in a circus; but how could they, 
who were a thousand feet away, know better than I, 
who was on the spot ? When I put that poser to them, 
however, one of them replied that it was because they had 
their eyes open. The only sympathetic witness I found was 
one who admitted that, while the 'kite' itself behaved with 
a good deal of chgnity, the basket did perform some evolu- 
tions not unrcmotely suggestive of a canvas water-bucket 
swung on the end of a rope by a sailor in a hurry for his 
morning "souse." 
