"There's _Vindictive_!" The muffled seamen and marines standing by the torpedo-tubes and the guns turned at that name to gaze at the great black ship, seen mistily through the streaming smoke from the destroyer's funnels, plodding silently to her goal and her end. Photographs have made familiar that high-sided profile and the tall funnels, with their Zeebrugge scars, always with a background of the pier at Dover against which she lay to be fitted for her last task; now there was added to her the environment of the night and the sea and the greatness and tragedy of her mission. [Sidenote: Small craft guide the _Vindictive_.] She receded into the night astern as the destroyer raced on to lay the light buoy that was to be her guide, and those on board saw her no more. She passed thence into the hands of the small craft, whose mission it was to guide her, light her, and hide her in the clouds of the smoke-screen. [Sidenote: Precise orders are planned for each stage of operation.] There was no preliminary bombardment of the harbor and the batteries as before the previous attempt; that was to be the first element in the surprise. A time-table had been laid down for every stage of the operation; and the staff work beforehand had even included precise orders for the laying of the smoke barrage, with plans calculated for every direction of wind. The monitors, anchored in their firing-positions far to seaward, awaited their signal; the great siege batteries of the Royal Marine Artillery in Flanders--among the largest guns that have ever been placed on land-mountings--stood by likewise to neutralize the big German artillery along the coast; and the airmen who were to collaborate with an aerial bombardment of the town waited somewhere in the darkness overhead. The destroyers patrolled to seaward of the small craft. [Sidenote: The signal is given for the guns to open.] The _Vindictive_, always at that solemn gait of hers, found the flagship's light-buoy and bore up for where a coastal motor-boat, commanded by Lieutenant William R. Slayter, R.N., was waiting by a calcium flare upon the old position of the Stroom Bank buoy. Four minutes before she arrived there, and fifteen minutes only before she was due at the harbor mouth, the signal for the guns to open was given. Two motor-boats dashed in towards the ends of the high wooden piers and torpedoed them. There was a machine-gun on the end of the western pier, and that vanished in the roar and the leap of flame and debris which called to the guns. Over the town a flame suddenly appeared high in air, and sank slowly earthwards--the signal that the aeroplanes had seen and understood; and almost coincident with their first bombs came the first shells whooping up from the monitors at sea. The surprise part of the attack was sprung. [Sidenote: The attack is a complete surprise.]