Owing to the objectives chosen, the conditions of the weather, the brevity of their visit, and their power and speed, the enemy squadrons made port intact again, though a patrol of destroyers very pluckily attacked them. In all nearly one hundred civilians were killed in these three towns, about five hundred being wounded; the military casualties amounted to thirty-four, and those on the three destroyers to twenty-eight. The German battle-cruisers, employed in this expedition were identified as the _Derfflinger_, _Seydlitz_, _Moltke_, _von der Tann_, and _Blücher_, the three latter, it was believed, having been also engaged in the previous raid upon the Norfolk coast. Though, as we have said, it was quite impossible to give an absolute guarantee against such incidents as these, they were certainly not soothing to the feelings of the Grand Fleet and least of all to those of its cruiser squadrons. In spite of the elaborate justifications voiced in the German Press by such writers as Count Reventlow, they had outraged every canon not only of international law but of decent seaman-like feeling, and were an early indication of the horrible license that German sea-policy was prepared to allow itself. That had not yet staggered the world, as the sinking of the _Lusitania_ was to stagger it, or such incredible atrocities as that to be associated with the _Belgian Prince_; but it had opened up a vista to {90} every clean-hearted sailor sufficiently dark as to have changed the character of the war. It was now plain, for example, that such naval leaders as Admiral von Spee and the captain of the _Emden_ were no longer to be regarded as typical of the directing minds of Germany's navy. How completely they were in the end to be disregarded was not yet manifest; but it was already clear that the old and peculiar amenities, the traditional chivalry of sea-warfare, were but poorly respected, even if they were understood, by this latest aspirant to sea-power. It was with a special satisfaction, therefore, that early on January 24, 1915, a strong patrolling fleet, under Sir David Beatty, received news of a powerful enemy squadron not far away to the south-south-east.