The surprise, despite the German's watchfulness, seems to have been complete. Up till the moment when the torpedoes of the motor-boats exploded, there had not been a shot from the land--only occasional routine star-shells. The motor-launches were doing their work magnificently. These pocket-warships, manned by officers and men of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, are specialists at smoke-production; they built to either hand of the _Vindictive's_ course the likeness of a dense sea-mist driving landward with the wind. The star-shells paled and were lost as they sank in it; the beams of the searchlights seemed to break off short upon its front. It blinded the observers of the great batteries when suddenly, upon the warning of the explosions, the guns roared into action. [Sidenote: Heavy batteries on the Ostend coast open fire.] There was a while of tremendous uproar. The coast about Ostend is ponderously equipped with batteries, each with its name known and identified: Tirpitz, Hindenburg, Deutschland, Cecilia, and the rest; they register from six inches up to monsters of fifteen-inch naval pieces in land-turrets, and the Royal Marine Artillery fights a war-long duel with them. These now opened fire into the smoke and over it at the monitors; the Marines and the monitors replied; and, meanwhile, the aeroplanes were bombing methodically and the anti-craft guns were searching the skies for them, Star-shells spouted up and floated down, lighting the smoke banks with spreading green fires; and those strings of luminous green balls, which airmen call "flaming onions," soared up up to lose themselves in the clouds. Through all this stridency and blaze of conflict, the old _Vindictive_, still unhurrying, was walking the lighted waters towards the entrance. It was then that those on the destroyers became aware that what had seemed to be merely smoke was wet and cold, that the rigging was beginning to drip, that there were no longer stars--a sea-fog had come on. [Sidenote: Destroyers keep in touch by lights and sirens.] The destroyers had to turn on their lights and use their sirens to keep in touch with each other; the air attack was suspended, and _Vindictive_, with some distance yet to go, found herself in gross darkness. [Sidenote: The fog and smoke are dense.] [Sidenote: A motor-boat leads the way for _Vindictive_.]