On Memmert was the depot for the salvage operations. Salvage work,
with its dredging and diving, offered precisely the disguise that was
needed. It was submarine, and so are some of the most important
defences of ports, mines, and dirigible torpedoes. All the details of
the story were suggestive: the 'small local company'; the 'engineer
from Bremen' (who, I wondered, was he?); the few shares held by von
Brüning, enough to explain his visits; the stores and gear coming
from Wilhelmshaven, a naval dockyard.

Try as I would I could not stir Davies's imagination as mine was
stirred. He was bent on only seeing the objections, which, of course,
were numerous enough. Could secrecy be ensured under pretext of
salving a wreck? It must be a secret shared by many--divers, crews of
tugs, employees of all sorts. I answered that trade secrets are often
preserved under no less difficult conditions, and why not imperial
secrets?

'Why the Ems and not the Elbe?' he asked.

'Perhaps,' I replied, 'the Elbe, too, holds similar mysteries.'
Neuerk Island might, for all we knew, be another Memmert; when
cruising in that region we had had no eyes for such things, absorbed
in a preconceived theory of our own. Besides, we must not take
ourselves too seriously. We were amateurs, not experts in coast
defence, and on such vague grounds to fastidiously reject a clue
which went so far as this one was to quarrel with our luck. There was
a disheartening corollary to this latter argument that in my new-born
zeal I shut my eyes to. As amateurs, were we capable of using our
clue and gaining exact knowledge of the defences in question? Davies,