They could head, and turn, the line of German ships because they outpaced them. But if the ships were swift, death was swifter. It was as they whirled around across the head of the German line that the _Queen Mary_ and the _Indefatigable_, in turn, were destroyed, and destroyed in a space of time to be reckoned in minutes—whether by the concentrated fire of the big German Dreadnoughts, or by the misadventure of striking a floating mine, is not clear. It is exactly at the two points of furious speed and of destructive energy that the contrast betwixt Trafalgar and the fight in the North Sea is greatest. At Trafalgar, as everyone knows, the Franco-Spanish fleet was drawn up, or had drifted, into a straggling crescent four miles from tip to tip—thirty-three great line-of-battle ships, armed with more than 3000 guns, a curving forest of masts and flags. The British in two columns—Nelson in the _Victory_ leading one column, Collingwood in the _Royal Sovereign_ the other—bore down on the enemy, but there was no speed in the movement. They drifted, rather than sailed, at the rate of less than two miles an hour—less than a walking-pace, that is—into this curve of hostile guns; and the coolness of the British crews and their officers was in keeping with the deliberation with which their ships approached the enemy. The _Royal Sovereign_ was a quarter of a mile ahead of its column, and was certain to receive the concentrated fire of the enemy’s line for nearly half an hour without support, yet Collingwood was not only nibbling but _paring_ an apple on the quarter-deck while waiting for the great game to begin. Nelson’s three-deckers, compared with the modern Dreadnought or battle-cruiser, were tiny ships. They had an average tonnage of a little over 2000 tons—the _Victory_ herself was of 2223 tons. Now, a ship of the _Queen Elizabeth_ class is of 27,000 tons, equal to the tonnage of the whole column of Nelson’s ships at Trafalgar. The _Victory_ carried 101 guns, about one-third being 32-pounders; there were only two carronades firing a shot of sixty-two pounds. If every gun on the _Victory_ had been fired in one sudden broadside, the entire weight of metal would have been 2296 pounds, or a little over one ton of iron, and the effective range would be less than half a mile. But the _Queen Elizabeth_, with her 15-inch guns, could discharge, in a single broadside, _twenty-seven tons_ of steel, and could strike her mark with that tempest of flying metal—a swarm of aerolites—once every thirty seconds, a dozen miles away.