Already a shot or two had been fired from the _Lion's_ forward guns, taking the _Blücher_ as her target, and, a few minutes after nine, she made her first hit on this cruiser, carrying away her bridge, according to the prisoners afterward taken. At this range, with her 13.5's tilted at an angle of some sixteen degrees and her big shells dropping steeply, the fire of the _Lion_ seems, under the circumstances, to have been remarkably accurate. About ten minutes later, the _Tiger_ came into range and took up the attack on the _Blücher_, the _Lion_ transferring her attentions to the _Seydlitz_, the next ahead. Meanwhile the enemy had begun to respond but without inflicting any damage, and, a quarter of an hour later, the _Princess Royal_ was able to join in the chorus, also taking the _Blücher_ for her first target. The _Blücher_, slower than her consorts, and already heavily damaged, was now dropping astern and came under the guns of the _New Zealand_, the _Princess Royal_ transferring her fire to the _Seydlitz_ with immediate and visible results. The enemy's destroyers were now throwing up dense columns of smoke to screen his wounded battle-cruisers; but, by a quarter to ten, not only the _Blücher_, but the _Derfflinger_ and _Seydlitz_ were on fire. Our own light cruisers and destroyer flotillas had fallen back to port a little so as not to obscure the range; and the position just {94} before ten exhibited the _Lion_ confining her attentions to the _Derfflinger_, the _Tiger_ attacking the _Derfflinger_, and, when this was hidden from her by smoke, the doomed and swiftly-flagging _Blücher_, the _Princess Royal_ shelling the _Seydlitz_, and the _New Zealand_ engaging the _Blücher_--the _Indomitable_, in spite of her efforts, not having yet drawn within effective range. The condition of the _Blücher_, as was afterward learned from prisoners, though it was to become worse, was already terrible enough. Early in the action her electric plant had been destroyed, and her men down below crept in darkness. Still too far to be raked, her decks were being excavated by half-ton shells dropping from the sky. In the narrow spaces below, apart from the shattering shell fragments, the enormous air-displacement wrought destruction and death. Iron plates were moulded by it as if they had been wax, and men tossed like apples and crushed to pulp against them. Later, as the range narrowed, the _Blücher_ became more helpless, and, as she came under the full force of the British broadside fire, she staggered at each salvo, scarcely recovering before another hurled her again on her side.