"So we swung round at right angles and charged full speed at the enemy, like a hussar attack. We got away at the start magnificently and led the field, so that all the enemy's fire was aimed at us for the next ten minutes. When we got so close that the debris of their shells fell on board, we altered our course and so threw them out in their reckoning of our speed, and they had all their work to do over again. You follow that with a destroyer coming at you at 30 knots it means that the range is decreasing at the rate of about 150 yards per ten seconds. When you see that your last shot fell, say, 100 yards short, you put up 100 extra yards on your sights; but this takes five seconds to do. When you have in this way discovered his speed you put that correction in automatically; a cruiser can do this, a destroyer has not room for the complicated apparatus involved. Humanly speaking, therefore, the captain, by twisting and turning at the psychological moment, saved us; actually I feel we are in God's keeping these days. "After ten minutes we got near enough to fire our torpedo, and then turned back to the _Arethusa_. Next our follower arrived just where we had been and fired his torpedo, and of course the enemy fired at him, instead of at us. What a blessed relief! It was like coming out of a really hot and oppressive orchid house into the cool air of a summer garden. A 'hot' fire is properly descriptive; it seems actually to be hot! After the destroyers came the _Fearless_, and she stayed on the scene, and soon we found she was engaging a three-funneller, the _Mainz_. So off we started again to go for the _Mainz_, the situation being, I take it, that crippled _Arethusa_ was too 'tummy'-aching to do anything but be defended by us, her children. "Scarcely, however, had we started (I did not feel the least like another gruelling) when from out the mist and across our front in furious pursuit came the First Cruiser Squadron, the Town class, _Birmingham_, &c., each unit a match for three _Mainz_, and as we looked and reduced speed they opened fire, and the clear 'bang! bang!' of their guns was just a cooling drink! To see a real big four-funneller spouting flame, which flame denoted shells starting, and those shells not aimed at us but for us, was the most cheerful thing possible. Even as Kipling's infantryman, under heavy fire, cries 'The Guns, thank Gawd, the Guns', when his own artillery has come into action over his head, so did I feel as those 'Big Brothers' came careering across.