Established at the beginning of the war, the examination service in the Downs, therefore, continued without intermission to its end, the work being conducted by the Ramsgate Boarding Flotilla, largely manned by reservists and volunteers. From a hundred and twenty, diminishing, as the war proceeded, to eighty vessels a day were thus overhauled; and, almost every night, the Patrol was responsible for the safety of a hundred vessels here at anchorage. Nor did these duties exhaust the list, for to the Dover Patrol fell the additional task of supporting, day and night, the left flank of the British army. In a very real sense, indeed, it was itself not only the left flank of the British army, but of the whole of the Allied forces reaching from the Alps to the Belgian coast. Subject to continual attack not only from enemy surface-craft and the ever more efficient German submarines, but from daily and nightly excursions of hostile aeroplanes and airships, its own weapons of offence were largely novel and hitherto untried. The sea-going monitor was still, in most respects, an unfamiliar vessel; and the splendid qualities of these shallow-draught gun-platforms--some of which had just been completed for river work in Brazil--were as yet unrevealed when first {209} enlisted for their arduous duties upon the Belgian coast. When it is also recalled that under no other command, perhaps, was serving so large a proportion of amateurs, some idea becomes possible, not only of the peculiar functions of the Dover Patrol, but of the very deep debt owed by the nation to this sort of naval maid-of-all-work. To Rear-Admiral the Hon. Horace A. L. Hood--afterward, as we have seen, to be lost in the Battle of Jutland--fell the responsible task, in the first days of war, of directing the activities of this composite force; and, in the great race toward the coast that followed the first battle of the Marne, a flotilla under his command was actively engaged in supporting the left wing of the Belgian army. It was during the last half of October, 1914, that the military position, as regarded the coast-line, was most critical; and it was during the night of October 17th that Admiral Hood, flying his flag in the old fleet-scout _Attentive_, anchored off Nieuport Pier with three monitors, the _Severn_, _Humber_, and _Mersey_, the light cruiser _Foresight_, and several destroyers. Early next morning news was received that the German infantry was marching from Westende, and the flotilla moved up the coast to draw the fire from, and if possible to silence, the batteries that accompanied them. Almost immediately fire broke out from the shore, and this proved to be the beginning of a coastal campaign that continued without intermission for the next three weeks. For the defence of Nieuport some machine-guns from the monitor _Severn_ were put ashore, and it was while in charge {210} of these that Lieutenant E. S. Wise, gallantly leading his men, was killed.