The charge was irresistible; the batteries were taken, the dug-outs cleared, the hangars fired, the store-sheds blown up, and those of the enemy who escaped into a destroyer were sent to the bottom in her by a bombing attack from the parapet. All this was done in fifteen minutes; then followed a tremendous explosion at the shore end of the Mole. The C3, manned by half a dozen officers and men under Lieutenant R. D. Sandford, R.N., had made straight for the piles of the viaduct under the searchlights of the enemy, who seem to have thought that she was bent on passing through to attack the ships in the harbour, and was therefore sure to be trapped among the struts and piles. Then, when they saw her crew reappear in a tiny motor-boat they opened fire with machine-guns; but they had only wounded and not disabled their quarry, for immediately C 3 exploded and destroyed the viaduct and all upon it, cutting off the Mole from communication with the shore. Lieutenant R. D. Sandford, with his five companions, was picked up by a steam pinnace commanded by his brother, Lieutenant-Commander Sandford, and brought away safely. Both as tactics and as a moral reinforcement their exploit was of the highest value. Ten minutes afterwards the block-ships, the _Thetis_ (Commander R. S. Sneyd), the _Intrepid_ (Lieutenant Stuart Bonham-Carter), and the _Iphigenia_ (Lieutenant V. W. Billyard-Leake), were seen rounding the lighthouse and heading for the entrance of the canal. The _Thetis_ was leading, and received the concentrated fire of the enemy; she ran aground on the edge of the channel and was sunk partially across it, signalling to her consorts, as she went down, to avoid the nets which had fouled her own propeller. The _Intrepid_ and the _Iphigenia_ thereupon passed straight up the canal to a point at which they were two or three hundred yards inside the shore lines and actually behind the German guns on the Mole. They were then blown up and sunk across the channel, and their crews took to the boats and got away out to sea, where they were eventually taken on board the destroyers. An hour had now passed and the work was done. Even the lighthouse had been sacked, for Wing-Commander Brock, who was in charge of the smoke-screen operations, had not only led the charge into the big gun battery, but had made a special objective of the range-finder in the lighthouse top and came down laden with an armful of spoil. He was last seen lying desperately wounded under the parapet wall of the Mole; but this was not reported until afterwards, and his fate remained uncertain. The siren was shrieking the recall, half drowned by the noise of gun-fire; it was twenty minutes before the word could be given to cast off.