This latter destroyer, having sighted a light cruiser about to attack the _Lion_ with torpedoes, had at once assailed her with the utmost spirit, closing to within a range of a little over a mile, and firing no less than fifty-eight rounds at her. She had then proceeded to attack some enemy battle-cruisers, and had already fired one of her torpedoes, when she was struck by a shell; and her commander, thinking his torpedoes all gone, had then ordered her retirement. Learning, however, that he still had three torpedoes left, he again attacked and torpedoed the light cruiser, with which he had been previously engaged, sighted some more battleships and loosed the rest of his torpedoes, before his vessel gave out and came to a standstill. It was while thus drifting helplessly, and with shells plunging all about her, that the _Defender_, whose own speed had been reduced to about ten knots, came alongside and took her in tow. Twice during the night, owing to the rising sea, the tow between these two heroic cripples became parted, {197} and twice it was made good, the two journeying together till the afternoon of the following day. Lastly must be mentioned the _Abdiel_, which, under the command of Captain Berwick Curtis, had been ordered by Admiral Jellicoe to lay mines behind the retreating Germans. This her great speed--40 knots an hour--and the gallantry of all on board enabled her to do, the flying enemy sustaining several casualties as the result of her enterprise and skill. So ended the Battle of Jutland, as regarded the sea, the most gigantic that the world had known--for, when the next day dawned, June 1st, a day already glorious in British annals, it was to find the enemy gone and Admiral Jellicoe in unchallenged possession of the field. Breaking through mists, well-nigh as dense as those in which it had set, the sun rose and with it the hopes of the British admirals that the work of the night might be completed. Those hopes, alas, remained unfulfilled, for, when the fog cleared and the sea lay revealed, it became apparent that the enemy had fled, broken and dispirited, under the cover of darkness, and was in no mood to rejoin the battle that he was already proclaiming as a German victory. Four hundred miles from its bases--in enemy waters, close to his very harbours--the Grand Fleet waited till eleven in the morning before reluctantly sailing for home. And it was this fact, in itself a proof of triumph, that was partly accountable for the immediate sequel. For there now followed, thanks to the precipitate German flight, and the enemy's neighbourhood to his bases; to the world's {198} unfamiliarity, after nearly a century, with the cost and criterion of naval success; and to the prompt and wholly unscrupulous use by the German Government of its wireless press agencies--an almost world-wide belief that the British Fleet had met with disaster.