To complete the victory of this single-ship action everyone on board had contributed his utmost, but it seems probable that in history the larger share of the credit will be given unstintingly to the engineers and stokers. It was certainly bestowed on them by their comrades in the _Kent_. "The captain," we are told, "nearly fell on the engineer-commander's neck and kissed him when he 'blew up' after the action to see him and to advise as to the best speed to go back to harbour. He nearly shouted at him for some time: 'My dear fellow, my dear engineer-commander! You won the action, you did it splendid! Without your speed we should have lost everything.'" Meanwhile, at Port Stanley, now in wireless communication with all the rest of Admiral Sturdee's squadron, the silence of the _Kent_, owing to her broken wireless, had begun to give rise to some alarm. "_Kent, Kent, Kent_" rang the invisible call, but there was no {83} reply, and it was feared that she had been lost. It was perhaps characteristic that, in spite of this, she was the first of them all to reach port the next day. Of von Spee's squadron only the _Dresden_ remained, to be run to earth three months later. The _Bristol_ and _Macedonia_, after capturing their crews, had sunk the _Santa Isabel_ and the _Baden_; and the total British casualties in killed and wounded amounted to less than thirty. {84} CHAPTER V BACK TO THE NORTH SEA "Our trawlers mined the fairway. Our cruisers spread the bait, We shelled the Briton's seaside towns To lure him to his fate, We set the trap twice over. We left him with his dead--" "But now we'll play another game," The British sailor said. With the destruction of von Spee's squadron nothing of Germany's navy was left at large in the outer seas save one or two cruisers and armed merchantmen, whose days of freedom were already numbered. Of these the survivor of the Falkland Islands' Battle, the _Dresden_, was destroyed in the following March at Juan Fernandez; the _Königsberg_, bottled up in the Rufiji River in Africa, was finally disposed of a few months later; while the _Kronprinz Wilhelm_, the _Prinz Eitel Friedrick_, and the _Karlsrühe_ met with various fates during the same summer. That in spite of the enormous calls upon the navy in the way of convoying transports they were joined by no others from their home waters is the best tribute to the efficiency of our floating cordon in the North Sea. And yet its very success in this respect was largely responsible, perhaps, for a {85} somewhat distorted picture of the actual position--that of a sulky and immobilized German Fleet confronted with an impenetrable British barrier.