Lieutenant Bonham Carter, having sent away his boats, was reduced to a Carley float, an apparatus like an exaggerated lifebuoy with the floor of a grating. Upon contact with the water it ignited a calcium flare and he was adrift in the uncanny illumination with a German machine gun a few hundred yards away giving him its undivided attention. What saved him was possibly the fact that the defunct Intrepid still was emitting huge clouds of smoke which it had been worth nobody's while to turn. He managed to catch a rope, as the motor launch started, and was towed for awhile till he was observed and taken on board. THE VINDICTIVE'S STORY Commander Alfred F. B. Carpenter, who commanded the Vindictive and who was made Captain for his successful work, gave an Associated Press correspondent an interesting description of the episode. During the attack he was at the end of the bridge in a small steel box or cabin which had been specially constructed to house a flame thrower. The Captain, with his arm in a sling, standing on the shell-battered deck of the Vindictive, said: Exactly according to plan we ran alongside the mole, approached it on the port side, where we were equipped with specially built buffers of wood two feet wide. As there was nothing for us to tie up to, we merely dropped anchor there, while the Daffodil kept us against the mole with her nose against the opposite side of our ship. In the fairly heavy sea two of our three gangways were smashed, but the third held, and 500 men swarmed up this on to the mole. This gangway was two feet wide and thirty feet long. The men who went up it included 300 marines and 150 storming seamen from the Vindictive, and fifty or so from the Daffodil. They swarmed up the steel gangway, carrying hand grenades and Lewis guns. No Germans succeeded in approaching the gangway, but a hard hand-to-hand fight took place about 200 yards up the mole toward the shore. The Vindictive's bow was pointed toward the shore, so the bridge got the full effect of enemy fire from the shore batteries. One shell exploded against the pilot house, killing nearly all its ten occupants. Another burst in the fighting top, killing a Lieutenant and eight men, who were doing excellent work with two pompoms and four machine guns. The battery of eleven-inch guns at the end of the mole was only 300 yards away, and it kept trying to reach us. The shore batteries also were diligent. Only a few German shells hit our hull, because it was well protected by the wall of the mole, but the upper structure, mast, stacks, and ventilators showed above the wall and were riddled. A considerable proportion of our casualties were caused by splinters from these upper works.