The first stormers of the mole found themselves on a pathway about nine feet wide inside, and about four feet below the parapet of the mole. Two German destroyers were alongside the mole on the harbour side, but showed no activity, and the handful of the enemy found on the mole who subsequently attempted to regain these vessels were killed, the destroyers being liberally bombed. One of these craft was torpedoed alongside by a Coastal Motor Boat. Followed by his men, Lieutenant-Commander Adams captured the look-out station on the mole, and was joined here by Wing-Commander F. A. Brock, R.N.A.S., who had come in search of certain information, risking the hazard of that bullet-swept mole to gain it. This gallant and public-spirited officer was missed shortly after, and not seen again. In the meanwhile Lieutenant-Commander Harrison led a desperate rush to the westward against a machine-gun that was causing heavy casualties. He was killed at the head of his men, and all old Rugby Internationals will mourn that gallant forward who led his last rush to the muzzle of a German gun. Lieutenant-Commander Adams subsequently returned and searched for his body without avail amid the dead and litter of the shrapnel-spattered causeway. Details of that wild brave hour’s work on Zeebrugge mole will doubtless come to us, as such details do, piecemeal in the years ahead; and many, all too many, will for ever go unrecorded. In all the dashing gallantry of that deathless assault none played a finer part than the Royal Marines, the Corps that wears a laurel wreath in its proud crest. And when the work was done and the syren eventually hooted the Recall through the din and crashing uproar of bursting shell, it was the Marines, shoulder to shoulder, who covered the retreat. Of the retirement itself mere imagination tells enough to stir the blood and quicken a man’s heart. The enemy had concentrated the fire of every gun that would bear upon the mole and brows leading to the _Vindictive_: back through this savage barrage came the remnants of those gallant companies, reeling along with their wounded on their backs, to be struck down and to rise again and stagger on with their burdens, turning every now and then to shake bloody fists at the flaming docks and town beneath its pall of smoke....