"Once we were in safety I hated it. We had just been having our own imaginations stimulated on the subject of shells striking us, and now, a few minutes later, to see another ship not three miles away reduced to a piteous mass of unrecognizability, wreathed in black fumes, from which flared out angry gouts of fire like Vesuvius in eruption, as an unending stream of 100-pound shells burst on board; it just pointed the moral and showed us what might have been! The _Mainz_ was immensely gallant. The last I saw of her, absolutely wrecked alow and aloft, her whole midships a fuming inferno, she had one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance, 'like a wild cat mad with wounds'. Our own four-funnelled friend recommenced at this juncture with a couple of salvos, but rather half-heartedly; and we really did not care a ----, for there, straight ahead of us in lordly procession, like elephants walking through a pack of 'pi-dogs', came the _Lion_, _Queen Mary_, _Invincible_, and _New Zealand_, our battle-cruisers. Great and grim and uncouth as some antediluvian monsters, how solid they looked, how utterly earth-quaking. "We pointed out our latest aggressor to them, whom they could not see from where they were, and they passed down the field of battle with the little destroyers on their left and the destroyed on their right, and we went west while they went east, and turned north between poor four-funnels and her home, and just a little later we heard the thunder of their guns for a space, then all silence, and we knew. Then wireless: '_Lion_ to all ships and destroyers; retire'. That was all. "Remains only little details, only one of which I will tell you. The most romantic, dramatic, and piquant episode that modern war can ever show. The _Defender_, having sunk an enemy, lowered a whaler to pick up her swimming survivors; before the whaler got back an enemy's cruiser came up and chased the _Defender_, and thus she abandoned her whaler. Imagine their feelings; alone in an open boat without food, twenty-five miles from the nearest land, and that land the enemy's fortress, with nothing but fog and sea around them. Suddenly a swirl alongside, and up, if you please, pops His Britannic Majesty's submarine E 4, opens his conning-tower, takes them all on board, shuts up again, dives, and brings them home 250 miles! Is not that magnificent? No novel would dare face the critics with an episode like that in it, except, perhaps, Jules Verne--and all true!" FOOTNOTES: [81] The first shot, probably from the _Amphion_--thus the first shot of the war afloat--was fired by Private J. B. King, R.M.L.I. (Plymouth), who died of wounds in Netley Hospital soon after the sinking of the _Amphion_. [82] Official account. [83] Fred. T. Jane, _Your Navy as a Fighting-machine_. [84] _Naval and Military Record._ [85] In the _Morning Post_. CHAPTER XVII Operations in the North Sea and Channel