"One burly Hun, picked up by my coxswain whom I had sent in charge of my galley, gave the lad the surprise of his life, when he exclaimed (in impeccable Cockney English), the instant he was safe aboard: 'G'blyme, myte, but ein't it bally cold?' I found out later that he had been for a number of years an interpreter in the Law Courts of Sydney, Australia. An extremely significant admission that he made me in the burst of confidence induced by thankfulness at finding himself safe and sound after the hell he had been through, was to the effect that he had received notice of mobilisation toward the end of June. One could not ask for better evidence than that of the deliberation with which Germany prepared for the war which she has made such frantic efforts to delude the world into thinking was 'forced' upon her by the Allies--in August! "My greatest surprise of the day, and certainly the most welcome, came when I asked for a report on our casualties. There were none, or rather only one--the ship's canary, killed in its cage when a shell exploded in the wardroom pantry. This, considering the fact that the _Cornwall_ had been hit eighteen times by four-point-one shell, was indeed good luck, and fully vindicated the plan I had followed of fighting the earlier stages of the battle at a range which, while short enough to allow my heavier guns to do deadly execution, was still somewhat extreme for the lighter ones of the enemy. The latter, it is true, were sighted up to a very considerable range, but both their accuracy and effectiveness fell off greatly as the angle at which they had to be elevated to carry these long distances was increased. "The battle cruisers had opened fire on the enemy armoured cruisers somewhere about noon. As it was not for an hour or two after that time that our divergent courses had taken us out of sight of each other, we had a good view of the early stages of the action. Here again the Huns opened with their usual spectacularity, and I think I am correct in saying that I saw one of their eight-point-twos crash home on the _Invincible_ before either of them had been struck by a twelve-inch shell from the battle cruisers. The balance was redressed a few minutes later, and long before the action became to us four lines of flame-splashed smoke on the distant horizon, it was plain that the Huns were already beaten. The _Scharnhorst_, Von Spee's Flagship, which had come in for rather more than her share of the fire up to that time, went down with her flag flying at about four o'clock. The _Gneisenau_ kept up a brave but unequal fight for two hours longer, which gave the _Carnarvon_ time to come up and help administer the _coup de grâce_.