Shortly our interest was to multiply fourfold, when the order to fire our own guns was given. After a time shells began to drop ominously near. I retired to my station, a selected spot just below waterline in the after bread room, one of the few available places in a ship of this class where some of my party of first-aid men could be accommodated; the other half of the party in charge of the sick-berth steward being situated at a similar station forward. This period one found trying. For knowledge as to how matters were progressing we had to rely upon fragments of information shouted down the nearest hatchway from someone in communication with those on the upper deck. The rat-tat-tat! rat, tat, tat, tat! on our side from time to time, as we got into the thick of it, told us plainly of shells pitching short and bursting, whose fragments struck but did not penetrate the ship's skin; it was a weird sound, occasionally varied by a tremendous "woomp," which once at least made the paymaster, who was reclining near me on a flour sack, and myself, look hard at the side close by us, where we fully expected, for the moment, to see water coming in. As a matter of fact, this shell entered some forty feet away, bursting on entry into the Lieutenant Commander's cabin, while its solid nose finally fetched up in the wardroom, where later on it was christened "our honorary member." For this trophy I believe we have the _Mainz_ or _Koeln_ to thank. The wardroom steward found a similar piece of shell in his hammock that night. It had penetrated the ship's side and a bulkhead before finally choosing its highly suitable place of rest. The shells that missed us burst upon the surface of the ocean near by and, strange as it may seem to those not familiar with such things, the fragments flew from the water with sufficient force to dent the sides of the ship and to kill men when they dropped on the deck. When a shell actually struck our ship and penetrated the structure there was a reverberating crash that roared from end to end and nearly drove our eardrums in and made work of any delicacy impossible. It was bad enough with us, but what must have been happening on some of the German ships that were now sinking and were being pierced by great shells from three sides at once I leave to some one with imagination. II--"I WATCHED THE BURNING CRUISER SINK" It would surely require the pen of a Dante to depict all the horrors that were happening on the German cruiser _Mainz_, as she went down. We knew that she was burning. The men stayed at their guns until the flames actually began to burn up their legs. The wounded lay in heaps on the deck and the flames destroyed them without help. The blood ran on the decks so that the men who were still trying to work the light deck guns slipped in it and fell.