"His next was a broadside salvo which straddled us, and his third--about ten minutes after his 'opener'--was a hit. And a right smart hit it was, too, though its results were by no means so bad as they might have been. I had the finest kind of a chance to see everything that that first shell did to us. It began by cutting off a pair of signal halyards on the engaged side, then tore a leg off the range-taker, then sheared off the stand supporting the range-finder itself, went through the hammocks lining the inside of the upper bridge, and finally down through the canvas screen of the signal bridge (behind where you were standing last night) and on into the sea. If it had exploded it could hardly have failed to kill the Captain, Navigator, and Gunnery Lieutenant, and probably pretty well all the rest of us on both bridges. "You may well believe, sir, that we were rather in a mess for some minutes following that smash, but I remember that the officers--and especially the Captain and Navigator--were as cool as ice through it all. The Captain went right on walking round the compass, taking his sights and giving his orders, while the 'Pilot' was squatting on top of the conning tower and following the _Emden_ through his glasses, just as though she had been a horse-race. I even remember him finding time to laugh at me when I ducked as one or two of the first shells screamed over. 'No use trying to get under the screen, Seabrooke,' he said; 'that canvas won't stop 'em.' "It was almost immediately after this that the after-control--located about amidships--met with even a worse disaster through being hit squarely with two or three shells from a closely bunched salvo. I had a clear view in that direction from where I stood, and chanced to be looking that way when the crash came. I saw a lot of arms and legs mixed up in the flying wreckage, but the sight I shall never forget was a whole body turning slowly in the air, like a dummy in a kinema picture of an explosion. As the profile of the face showed sharp against the sky for an instant, I recognised it as that of a chap who had been rather a pal of mine, and so knew that poor old M---- had 'got his' a couple of hours before I heard it from the Surgeon. "It was some minutes before there was any chance to look after the range-taker whose leg had been taken off by that first shell. They bundled the mangled fragments of his body together as best they could in one of those Neil Robertson folding stretchers, and I helped the party get it down the ladders. As the leg was cut off close up to the body the poor chap had bled terribly, and there was no chance of saving him. "While I was edging along the deck with the stretcher-party, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, what appeared to be a very funny sight--one of the gun crew of 'S2,' which was not engaged at the time, dabbling his foot in a bucket of water. When I came back I saw that it was anything but funny.