"The scene immediately after the explosion of the bomb is photographed indelibly on my memory; the events which followed are more of a jumble. The detonation was a good deal less sharp than I had expected, and so was the shock from it. The latter was not nearly so heavy as that from many a wave that had crashed over her bows, but, coming from aft rather than for'ard, the jolt had a distinctly different feel, and by a man 'tween decks would hardly have been mistaken for that from a sea. "It was the flash of the explosion--a huge spurt of hot, red flame--that was the really astonishing thing. It seemed to embrace the whole afterpart of the ship, and everything one of the forked tongues of fire was projected against burst into flame itself. "The ramshackle deckhouse, which had been reduced to kindling wood by the explosion, roared like a furnace in the middle of the poop. Even the deck itself was blazing. I had once been near an incendiary bomb in a London air raid, and knew that nothing else could have produced so sudden and so fierce a fire. "But I also knew that the first burst of flame is the worst in such a case, and that most of the fire came from the inflammable stuff in the bomb itself. "As I had always heard that sand was better than water in putting out a fire of this kind, and knowing we carried several barrels of it for scrubbing the decks, I ordered it to be brought up and thrown on the flames, but stood by on the bridge myself in case the skipper, who was bawling down the engine-room voice-pipe for more steam, needed me for anything else. "Luckily the sand was close at hand, and they were scattering it from buckets over the blazing deck within a minute or two. Except for the débris of the deckhouse, the fire was put out almost as quickly as it was started, and, between sand and water, even that was being rapidly got under control, when suddenly the Hun, whom I had almost forgotten in the rush of undoing his dirty work, flashed into sight again. "The skipper had our ship zigzagging so short and sharp by this time that her wake looked like the teeth of a big, crazy saw, and this the Hun was unable to follow closely enough to get a fore-and-aft sight down her as he had done the first time. "Coming up astern, he kicked out a bomb just before he was over her port quarter, but it only shot across her diagonally, and struck the water on her starboard side, about a hundred feet away. It went off with, if anything, a sharper crack than the one which had struck the poop, and the foam geyser the explosion shot up flashed a bloody red for the instant the water took to chill the glow of the molten thermit. "Vanishing even more quickly was a ragged red star which fluttered for a moment beneath the surface of the water itself as the flame stabs shot out in all directions from the central core of the explosion.