In each case the process was the same. The British officer who was to take command saluted as he {289} stepped aboard. The German officer, with his papers ready, met him, and handed these over for inspection. The German crew was then sent forward. The British navigating officer occupied the conning-tower, and the engineer-officer went below to superintend the working of the German engine-room ratings. Leaving the transports behind, and accompanied by destroyers, the twenty _U_ boats, in groups of five, then proceeded up the channel of the Stour, passing between the gate-ships of the buoyed steel nets. As each came to anchorage just off Parkeston Quay, she was met by a motor-launch, into which her crew was disembarked; and these, amidst the silence of thousands of spectators, were conveyed to the destroyers that took them back to the transports. From beginning to end there was no demonstration of any kind; and none was to greet the remainder of the submarines--a hundred and twenty in all--that followed them. From shame to shame, blotting the seas, they passed without comment to their prison. With equal truth that can be said of the procession that the next day was to witness, though here the note struck was one of a tragedy of which the surrendering _U_ boats had been incapable. For, in the mighty ships of the High Seas Fleet--travesties though they had become, as instruments of admiralty--there had been, as the British navy felt, at least the possibilities of an honourable end. Proudly built, they dated from an era in which the _U_ boat horror was still unimagined; and, in the hands of a Drake, could Germany have produced one, they might have postponed surrender and gone down in glory. Materially as {290} they had recovered, however, from their defeat at Jutland, from the moral reverse they had never looked up; and the disintegration had been completed by Germany's own submarine policy. Lacking a soul, the body had died; and, to many who witnessed that procession of corpses, there was a sense of almost personal indecency at presiding over such a ceremony. It was a quarter to four in the morning of November 21st when the Grand Fleet began to get under way to form the two mighty and moving walls between which the Germans were to approach the Firth of Forth; and the advanced destroyer-flotillas and light cruisers had set out for the rendezvous the night before. For ten days the North Sea had been shrouded in a thick mist, but, as the sun rose, the clouds blew off, and the sea lay clear and white-feathered. Later, and at different places along the hundred miles or so occupied by the parallel lines of the Grand Fleet, the mists were to triumph again, but only half-heartedly, and with the sun soon re-asserting itself.