1 p.m.
At daylight on the second day my position was still miserable . The battery was getting low again , the sea had gone down , and when I put my periscope up at 9 a.m. the horizon seemed to be ringed with patrols . I felt as if I was in an invisible net , and though I endeavoured to conceal my apprehension from the crew , I could see from the listless way they went about their duties that they realized that once again we were near the end of our resources . All the forenoon we crept along at thirty metres , until the tension was broken at 1 p.m. by a furious depth-charge attack . In some extraordinary way they had located me again and closed in upon me . The first charges were some little distance off , and as they got closer a feeling of desperation overcame me , and I seriously contemplated ending the agony by surfacing and fighting to the last with my gun . Curiously enough , the procedure that I adopted was the exact opposite .