A dismasted Destroyer, with riddled funnels and a foot of water swilling across the floor plates in the engine-room, bore down upon them about noon and took her crippled sister in tow. They passed slowly away to the westward, leaving the circle of grey, tumbling sea to the floating wreckage of a hundred fights and the thin keening of the gulls. The afternoon wore on: five drenched, haggard men were laboriously propelling a life-saving raft by means of paddles in the direction of the English coast that lay some hundred odd miles to the west. The waves washed over their numbed bodies, and imparted an almost lifelike air of animation to the corpse of a companion that lay between them, staring at the sullen sky. Suddenly one of the paddlers stopped and pointed ahead. A boat manned by four men appeared on the crest of a wave and slid down a grey-back towards them. The oarsmen were rowing with slow strokes, and eventually the two craft passed each other within hailing distance. The men on the raft stared hard. "'Uns!" said one. "Bloody 'Uns.... Strictly speakin', we did ought to fight 'em.... Best look t'other way, lads!" His companions followed his example and continued their futile mechanical paddling with averted heads. The bow-oar of the German boat, who had a blood-stained bandage round his head, also stared. "_Englaender!_" he said. "_Verdammte Schweine!_" and added, "_Fuenf!_ ..." whereupon he and his companions also averted their heads, because they were four. They passed each other thus. The waves that washed over the raft rolled the dead man's head to and fro, as if he found the situation rather preposterous. CHAPTER XI THE AFTERMATH Such was the Battle of the Mist, a triumphant assertion after nearly two years of vigil and waiting, of British Sea Power. It commenced with a cloud of smoke on the horizon no larger than a man's hand. Its consequences and effects spread out in widening ripples through space and time, changing the vast policies of nations, engulfing thousands of humble lives and hopes and destinies. Centuries hence the ripples will still be washing up the flotsam of that fight on the shores of human life. Long after the last survivor has passed to dust the echo of the British and German guns will rumble in ears not yet conceived. Princes will hear it in the chimes of their marriage bells; it will accompany the scratching of diplomatists' pens and the creaking wheels of the pioneer's ox-wagon. It will sound above the clatter of Baltic ship-yards and in the silence of the desert where the caravan routes stretch white beneath the moon. The Afghan, bending knife in hand over a whetstone, and the Chinese coolie knee-deep in his wet paddy-fields, will pause in their work to listen to the sound, uncomprehending, even while the dust is gathering on the labours of the historian and the novelist....