A greater captain is said to have been Captain Otto Weddigen, who achieved the sensational feat of pulling down three of our cruisers in one hour, and was supposed by some of his fellow-countrymen to have solved the problem of reducing the British Fleet to an equality with the German. But he owed more to luck and our inexperience than to any peculiar skill of his own. In the early morning of September 22, 1914, he stalked the armoured cruisers _Aboukir_, _Hogue_, and _Cressy_, old ships of 12,000 tons and 18 knots’ speed, which were out on patrol duty in the North Sea, and were about to take up their stations for the day’s work. The danger of the submarine was hardly yet fully recognised; and when the _Aboukir_ was struck by a violent explosion, the general belief in the squadron was that she had run foul of a mine. She listed heavily and sank slowly, her funnels almost level with the water, and the smoke coming out as from the water’s edge. The other two ships closed her at once, and had got within two cables of her when the _Hogue_ was struck in turn by two torpedoes almost simultaneously. The effect was extraordinary. ‘She seemed,’ says an eye-witness, ‘to give one jump out of the water and then to go straight down.’ So quickly did she go, that she was out of sight long before _Aboukir_, who took twenty minutes to sink, so that her men (as one of them said) ‘got time to do the best.’ The moment the _Hogue_ was struck, it was realised that submarines were at work, and _Cressy_ opened fire from one of her 9·2-in. guns. She was hit herself by two torpedoes immediately afterwards, and listed heavily, so that everything began to roll down the deck. But she sank slowly and her gunners kept up their fire most gallantly, giving up their chance of being saved for the hope of killing their enemy before they went down. They fired a dozen shots in all, and are said by Lieutenant Harrison to have sunk one of the attacking U-boats. ‘I reckon her gunners,’ said a survivor from the _Aboukir_, ‘were about the bravest men that ever lived. They kept up the firing until she had 40 degrees of list. They died gamely, did those fellows.’ Their shipmates were worthy of them. ‘There was absolutely no panic on the cruiser; the men were as calm as at drill.’ At last some trawlers came up; and, after two hours, some destroyers. Only 777 of the three ships’ crews were saved, out of a total of about 2,100; and 60 officers were lost out of 120. ‘Some of our men must have been in the water for three or four hours. The _Aboukir_ men were taken to the _Hogue_; when the _Hogue_ was sunk, they were taken to the _Cressy_; when the _Cressy_ was taken, they were thrown in the sea again. Yet here they are, and there is only one thing they want--to go to sea again and have another whack at the men who torpedoed them.’