It was now considered time to draw off seawards, and the spotting officers, perched on their tripods, had to climb down the railway irons under a heavy fire and swim to the ships sent to rescue them. The tripods were then pulled over on to their sides by ropes attached to their summits and left lying in the shallow water. Under cover of the smoke screen the bombarding fleet withdrew, after inflicting severe damage on the submarine base of Zeebrugge. . . . . . . . . Some two weeks previous to this bombardment a warship patrolling off the Belgian coast had reported a curious explosion in the direction of Nieuport. The night was dark and the stillness of summer rested over the Pas-de-Calais. Waves lapped gently the distant sand-dunes and war seemed a thing far away, remote as the icy winds which blow around the Poles. In the conning-tower and at the gun stations both officers and men watched keenly, silently, for the predatory Hun. At any moment the thin blackish-brown hulls of a raiding flotilla from the bases at Zeebrugge and Ostend might slide out of the blueness of the night. The beams of searchlights would momentarily cross and recross the intervening sea and then the guns would mingle their sharp reports with the groans of dying men. To the nerve-racking duties of night patrol in the Straits of Dover they had grown accustomed--indifferent with the contempt born of familiarity--but this did not cause any relaxation of vigilance. The element of surprise is too important a factor in modern war to be treated lightly. So it happened that when, shortly after eight bells in the middle watch, a momentary flash of lurid flame stabbed the darkness away over the Belgian coast, and was followed by the rumble of a great but distant explosion, no one stood on his head or lost his breath blowing up a patent waistcoat, but all remained at the "still." Minutes passed and nothing happened. Slowly the destroyer crept closer inshore, but the night was dark and no further sound broke its stillness. For two hours she scouted and listened. Little more than five miles away lay the German lines, and the theory was that somewhere in that maze of trenches and batteries an explosion had occurred. Next day the mystery deepened, for it became known that a large portion of Nieuport Pier had been blown away during the night. As this little seaport was, however, inside the German lines, the mystery remained unexplained until after the bombardment of Zeebrugge, when it became known, in _divers_ manner, that one of the electrically controlled boats had been out on a night manoeuvre and, owing to the difficulties of seaplane observation in the dark, had accidentally struck the breakwater of Nieuport. * * * * *