Chapter 35

SUBMARINING

(1917-1918)

Jutland proved to all hands in the German Navy that they had no chance whatever against Jellicoe's Grand Fleet. But the great mass of the German people never heard this truth; and even their navy hoped to win under the water a victory it had found impossible on top. So, for the last two years of the war, the Germans worked their hardest at what they called the "Submarine Blockade." As this "Blockade" forced the United States into war, and as its failure showed the Germans that, in the end, they had no more chance under water than on top, we can all see now that Jutland turned the scale.

The British fleets blockading Germany of course seized and kept for the Government, as spoils of war, whatever warlike stores (guns, shells, and so on) they could lay their hands on. But all the other goods the Navy stopped the Government bought, paying fair market prices. So the American and other neutrals trying to trade with the enemy had really nothing to complain of; for a blockade at sea is very like a siege on land, and nobody has ever pretended that a besieging army has not a perfect right to stop any supplies of any kind from reaching the besieged. Moreover, the crews of the ships trying to break the British blockade were always very kindly treated, though their ships were trying to help the enemy and make fortunes for their owners at the expense of freedom.

But when we turn to the German "Submarine Blockade" of the British Isles we find something quite different; for the German submarines sank every ship they could, and they generally were as utterly careless about the lives of the crews as they were about the cargo, no matter what the cargo was. In short, Germany tried everything, no matter how wrong, that could possibly hurt the hated British. She did let some neutral ships go by without attacking them. But that was only because she did not want to turn all the neutrals into enemies; and nothing proves better what a fiendish crime her "Submarine Blockade" really was than the fact that it forced even the Peace Party in the United States to change its mind about the war.

For thirty-two months this Peace Party kept the United States out of a war waged by Germany against the freedom of the world. There were a good many reasons why. Most Americans knew next to nothing about the affairs of Europe; and Germans had long been busy poisoning their minds against the French and British. Then, Washington and other Presidents had often advised them not to meddle with anything outside of America; and President Wilson had even said there was such a thing as being "too proud to fight."

Of course the Pacifists were against all war, even when their refusing to fight on the side of right forced them to help the side of wrong. They had plenty of money, some of it German, and they made almost as much trouble as the Germans and pro-Germans themselves. Then, the Germans, pro-Germans, and Pacifists raised the bogey of trouble for the United States at home, while there did not seem to be much danger of getting hurt from abroad. Finally, business was booming as it had never boomed before. The Americans made twelve-and-a-half thousands of millions of dollars out of the war, clear net profit up to the end of 1918.

The War Party said the whole war was about a question of right and wrong, and that the French and British were right, while the Germans were wrong. They said that Americans were safe because the British Navy barred the way, that all the British oversea Dominions had fought from the first, though not obliged to send a ship, a dollar, or a man except of their own free will. They said that every American patriot should be very proud to fight for the freedom of the world and very much ashamed to let the French and British uphold the cause of right alone. They said that the German submarines had already murdered many Americans, that many other Americans, ashamed to see their country hanging back, were already enlisting in Canada, England, and France, and that although business was certainly booming, beyond the wildest dreams of the keenest money-makers before the war, yet this vast wealth was too much like blood-money, since the French and British were suffering immense losses in lives and money and in everything but honour, while the Americans, losing nothing in lives, were making vast hoards of money out of a cause that really was their own--the cause of right and freedom.

Slowly but surely the War Party gained, as more and more members of the Peace Party began to see the truth. But still, after twenty-seven months, the most popular cry among those who voted President Wilson in for a second term was "he kept us out of war." Three months later the German "Submarine Blockade" began (February 1917). Then, two months later still, most of the Peace Party, seeing that their own ships would be sunk just as readily as French or British ships, gave their vote for war.

It was a glorious moment in world-history when British, French, and Americans at last stood side by side. The American Navy led the way, joining the hunt for German submarines with a keenness whetted by having been held back so long. The Army followed, bit by bit, until two million men had gone to Europe, thanks chiefly to the British ships that took them there. The Nation backed both Army and Navy with vast sums of money, which it could so easily afford, and with patriotic work of every splendid kind.

But the war lasted only nineteen months longer; and in that time the Americans were not able to do anything like what the Allies had done before and still were doing. The entire American loss in men (killed, wounded, and prisoners) was over one-quarter million. But Canada's loss of over two hundred thousand was ten times as great in proportion; for there are twelve-and-a-half times as many people in the United States as there are in Canada. In the same way the losses of France and Great Britain were each more than twenty times greater than that of the United States. In ships and money the difference is far more striking still. The British alone lost one-and-a-half times as many ships as all the rest of the world put together. But the Americans have actually gained, owing to the number of interned German vessels they seized in their ports. As for money: the British, the French, and all the Allies have spent so much in fighting for the freedom of the world that neither they nor their children, nor their children's children, can ever pay the vast debt off; while the United States have made, on their own showing, the twelve-and-a-half "billions" mentioned already.

These few facts (there are hundreds more) will show you a little of what the Great War means to the world, what the British Navy meant to the war, and what Jutland meant to both the war and the world, by sweeping the German Navy off the surface of the sea, and so bringing on the "Submarine Blockade" that itself forced the American Government to fight in self-defence.

The Germans, wishing to kill off their victims one at a time, were ready for the French and Russian Navies, but not for the British. They had less than forty sea-going submarines when the war began. But nearly four hundred took part, or were ready to take part, before the war was over, while many more were building.

We have already noted the weak points of submarines. They are "tender" because they must be thin. An old collier that couldn't steam faster than you could walk sank a submarine by barging into it, end-on--one can hardly call it ramming. Submarines are slower on the surface than dreadnoughts, cruisers, and destroyers; and, after doing a total of ten or twelve hours under water, they have to recharge their batteries; for they run by oil engines on the surface and by electricity submerged, and the crew would be smothered if the oil engines tried to charge batteries without coming up.

Then, firing torpedoes is not at all like firing big guns. At a range of five miles a shell will still be making 2000 feet a second or 1400 miles an hour. At the same range a torpedo like those used at Jutland would be making only 50 feet a second or 35 miles an hour. Thus shells whizz through the air forty times faster than torpedoes sneak through the water. A torpedo, in fact, is itself very like a submarine, more or less cigar-shaped, and with its own engine, screw, and rudder. Hitting with a torpedo really means arranging a collision between it and the ship you are aiming at. When you and the ship and your torpedo and the water are all moving in different ways you can see that hitting is not so easy. The shorter the range the better. But you cannot see at all unless your periscope, with its little mirror, is high and dry out of the water; and periscopes are soon spotted by a sharp look-out at very short range. The best torpedoes are over twenty feet long and as many inches through, and they will go ten miles. But the longer the range the slower the pace and the less the chance of hitting. The engine is driven by air, which is compressed so hard into the middle of the torpedo that it actually bulges out the steel a tiny fraction of an inch. You may set the air-valve fast or slow, and the torpedo will go accordingly. But if you want to make pretty sure you must get within less than a mile, with the ship's broadside toward you, set the torpedo for the right depth, the right pace to keep it going as fast as possible just long enough to hit, and of course the right aim. Then, if all goes well, the cap, or "war head" of the torpedo, on hitting the ship, will set off the fuse that sets off the tremendous charge of high explosive; and this may knock a hole in the side big enough to drive a street car through. But there are many more misses than hits.

Yet the German and Austrian raiders, mines, and submarines sank fifteen million tons of shipping, which is not far short of a third of all the merchant tonnage in the world; and the submarines sank more than the mines and raiders sank together. (Ships are measured by finding out how many cubic feet of space they contain and counting so many feet to the ton. Thus you get a much better idea of how much shipping a country has by counting in tons rather than by the number of ships; for twenty-five ships of one thousand tons each have only half as much sea-power as one ship of fifty thousand tons.) The British loss was nine millions, half as much again as was lost by all the rest of the world put together. Raiders like the cruiser _Emden_, or the armed and disguised merchant vessel _Möwe_, did a great deal of harm at the beginning of the war, as we have seen already. Mines did even more harm, and did it all through. But submarines did most.

Our title "Submarining" means any kind of underwater attack, by mines as well as by torpedoes, so we must take a glance at the mines before coming to the submarines.

Most mines are somewhat like big buoys with little horns all over the top. Each horn ends in a cap which, when hit, sets off the charge. Mines coupled together by a steel rope are more dangerous than two separate mines would be, as they are bound to be drawn in against any ship that strikes any part of the rope. The only safeguard a ship could carry was a paravane. A paravane is made up of a strong steel hawser (rope) that serves as a fender, and of two razor-edged blades that serve to cut the mine-moorings free. It is altogether under water and is shaped like a V, with the point jutting out on the end of steel struts ahead of the bows, the two strokes running clear of the sides, and their ends well winged out astern, where the two sharp blades stand straight up, one from each end. The lines by which mines are anchored were thus guided clear of the ship till they reached the blades, where they were cut. The mines then rose to the surface, where they could be set off at a safe distance. Dragging a paravane through the water made the ship go slow. But that was better than being blown up.

Minefields cannot, of course, be crossed at all. You might as well try to walk over armies of porcupines in your bare feet. Some minefields were very big. One British field ran from the Orkneys right across to Norway, to stop the German submarines from getting out round the north of Scotland. The American Navy did magnificent work at this field, the greater part of which was laid by American, not by British, vessels at the latter end of 1917 and earlier part of 1918. Other minefields blocked the Channel. But here the Germans once played a very clever trick which might have cost the British dear. A British minefield had been laid, some fifty feet deep, to catch submarines without being in the way of vessels on the surface. Two days after it had been secretly laid at night the _Nubian_, a British destroyer, had her bows blown off on the very same spot. The German submarine mine-layers had crept in by night and laid a shallow German minefield, exactly over the deep British minefield, to catch those who were trying to catch them. That, however, is not the end of the story. Just after the _Nubian_ had been towed into Portsmouth with her bows blown off, the _Zulu_, a destroyer of the same class, was towed in with her stern blown off. So perfectly were both these vessels built that, when they had each been cut in half, the good halves made an absolutely perfect new destroyer, which, under her compound name of _Zubian_, did excellent work against the Germans during the famous fights at Zeebrugge and Ostend.

A mine laid by a German submarine blew up the cruiser _Hampshire_ that was taking Kitchener to Russia by way of the Orkneys on the 5th of June, 1916. Kitchener was drowned and only twelve men, who floated in on a raft, were saved. Submarines lurking about at night would sometimes put mines right in the track of vessels. And sometimes swift mine-laying ships on the surface would do even more deadly harm, rolling a hundred mines off a little railway on deck. At other times mines would be loosed from the shore or from ships at anchor, so as to float in among vessels with the tide or down the current of a stream. One of these was tried against the British in West Africa by a German missionary. Others were sent against the French and British vessels in the Dardanelles, sometimes blowing them up.

But the enemy never had it all his own way. British submarines did wonderful work in spite of the mines. Commander Holbrook won the V.C. by feeling his perilous way through five lines of Turkish mines, though the currents were very tricky, and more than once the side of his "sub" actually touched the steel ropes holding the mines to their anchors. When he reached Constantinople he torpedoed and sank the Turkish battleship that was supposed to be guarding these very mines! Then he dived back through the five rows of mines and rejoined the fleet without a scratch.

Another British submarine stole into the Sea of Marmora with a couple of land mines to blow up the railway near Constantinople. Lieutenant D'Oyley-Hughes then swam ashore, pushing a little raft to which the mines were lashed. He was quite alone, but armed with a bayonet ground like a razor and an automatic seven-shooter. He also carried a flash-light and whistle. He shouldered first one mine and then the other, each the weight of a big man, took them up the hill, and put them under a little brickwork bridge within a hundred and fifty yards of the Turkish sentries, who were talking round their fire. Though he muffled the fuse pistol it was heard by the Turks, who came running toward him, firing as hard as they could. He let them have his first clip of seven shots slap in the face and then raced a mile along the line, doubled back a bit down the cliff, and swam off toward the submarine. His whistle was not heard at first, as the submarine was in the next bay; and he had to swim a mile before he came across her backing out under fire from the Turks. But he slipped into her conning tower safely, and no one on the British side was hurt.

So great is the danger from mines, unless they are watched and tackled the whole time, that thousands of mine-sweeping vessels were always at work, manned by British fishermen who had been handling gigantic nets and mile-long steel hawsers (ropes) ever since they had gone afloat as boys. These North Sea fishermen, in whom the Viking blood runs strong, had always put in eleven months sea time every year of their lives. So storm and fog and clammy numbing cold had no terrors for them as they worked their "sweepers" to and fro, fishing for the deadly mines. Sometimes, for all their skill and care, a mine would foul their tackle and blow them to pieces. But usually they could "gentle" a mine to the surface and set it off by rifle shots at a safe distance. Sometimes, however, a hitch would happen and the mine would come close alongside. Once a mine actually came aboard, caught fast in the tackle. The skipper (captain) ordered all hands into the boats, and then himself cut it clear after a whole hour's work, during which one false touch or even the slightest jolt would have blown his ship to smithereens. The wonder of it is that more men were not killed in keeping the seaways so carefully swept, night and day, all the year round, for tens of thousands of miles, during the fifty-one months of the war.

Still more dangerous was the fishing for those vilest of devil-fish, the German submarines. The fishermen "shot" enormous steel nets just as you shoot a fishing net, letting them hang a bit slack so as to be the more entangling. Then, just as you feel your rod quiver when a fish takes your fly, so these anglers for Germans would feel the quiver from a nosing submarine caught in the toils. Very few submarines ever escaped; for the slack of the waving net was apt to foul the screw, and there they were held till the last struggle ceased and the last man was smothered inside.

The fishermen would sometimes have rescued their ruthless enemies if they could have disentangled them in time. But this could rarely be done; and the Germans met a just fate. One day a submarine came up alongside a British trawler which was engaged in its regular fishing, was quite unarmed, and had a crew of old men and young boys. The Germans took all the fresh fish they wanted, sank the trawler, smashed up her boats, and put the fishermen on the submarine's deck. Then they slammed-to the hatch of the conning tower and sank very slowly, washing the fishermen off. Then they rose again to laugh at them drowning. An avenging destroyer came racing along and picked up the sole survivor. But the German jokers, seeing it coming, had gone. No wonder the seafaring British sometimes "saw red" to such a degree that they would do anything to get in a blow! And sometimes they did get it in, when the Germans least thought it was coming. When a skipper suddenly found a German U-boat (_Unterseeboot_ or under-sea-boat) rising beside him, just as his engine-room mechanic had come up with a hammer in his hand, he called out, "look sharp and blind her!" Without a moment's hesitation the mechanic jumped on her deck and smashed her periscope to pieces, thus leaving her the blinded prey of gathering destroyers.

The Germans put their wits to work with hellish cunning. They wanted to surround Great Britain with a sea of death so full of mines and submarines that no ship could live. The mines were not placed at random, but where they would either kill their victims best or make them try another way where the lurking submarines could kill them. The sea-roads into great ports like London and Liverpool converge, just as railway tracks converge toward some great central junction. So submarines lying in wait near these crowded waters had a great advantage in the earlier part of the war, when people still believed that the Germans would not sink unarmed merchantmen on purpose, especially when women and children were known to be on board.

On the 7th of May, 1915, the _Lusitania_, from New York for Liverpool, was rounding the south of Ireland, when the starboard (right-hand) look-out in the crow's nest (away up the mast) called to his mate on the port side, "Good God, Frank, here's a torpedo!" The next minute it struck and exploded, fifteen feet under water, with a noise like the slamming of a big heavy door. Another minute and a second torpedo struck and exploded. Meanwhile the crew had dashed to their danger posts and begun duties for which they had been carefully drilled, though very few people ever thought the Germans would torpedo a passenger steamer known to be full of women and children, carrying many Americans, and completely unarmed. The ship at once took a list to starboard (tilt to the right) so that the deck soon became as steep as a railway embankment. This made it impossible to lower boats on the up side, as they would have swung inboard, slithered across the steeply sloping deck, and upset. The captain, cool and ready as British captains always are, gave his orders from the up end of the bridge, while the other officers were helping the passengers into the boats. The sea soon came lapping over the down side of the deck, and people began slipping into it. The full boats shoved off; but not half of them on the down side were clear before the gigantic ship, with an appalling plunge, sank head first. It all happened so quickly that many had not been able to get on deck before this final plunge. They must have been crushed by the hurtling of all loose gear when the ship stood on her bows going down, then smothered and drowned, if not smashed dead at the first. The captain stood on the bridge to the last, went down with the ship, came up again among the wreckage, and was saved after hours in the water. He will never forget the long, piercing wail of despair from hundreds of victims as the gallant ship went down.

This made it clear to all but those who did not want to understand that Germany was going to defy the laws of the sea, at least as far as she could without changing President Wilson's Government into an enemy. So things went on, getting worse and worse, for another two years. The British, French, and Italians had never prepared for a war like this. They were ready to fight submarines that fought their own men-of-war, as well as those that tried to sink transports carrying soldiers and arms to the many different fronts. But who would have thought that even the Germans would sink every merchantman without the least care for the lives of the crew? The rest of the world thought the days of pirates and cut-throats were over among all civilized nations. But the Germans did not. So the Allies, the British especially, built more and more destroyers to fight the German submarines. The Germans, of course, built more and more submarines; and so the fight went on, growing ever fiercer.

It was up-hill work for the British to guard thousands of ships over millions of miles against the hidden foe, who sometimes struck without being seen at all. A ship is a small thing on millions of square miles. A slinking submarine is very much lower and harder to see on the surface. A periscope is far harder still. The ordinary periscope is simply a tube, a few inches in diameter, with a mirror in the upper end reflecting the outside view on the corresponding mirror at the lower end, where the captain watches his chance for a shot. No wonder the Germans got on well for so long. It was over two years before British merchantmen were armed. There was a shortage of guns; and the neutral American Government would not allow any armed merchantmen into their ports, though many and many a life was lost because a vessel was unarmed. But, bit by bit, the merchantmen were forced to arm or die like sheep before the German wolves; and once they had a gun they soon learnt how to use it.

One gun over the stern was all that most ships had. It was mounted astern because the best chance of escape was to turn away and go full speed, zig-zagging every which way as you went, firing at the chasing submarine; This made vessels harder for submarines to hit, not only on account of the zig-zags, but because the ship, going the same way as the torpedo, made fast and short shots harder to get; also because the backwash of the screw helped to put torpedoes off their course; and finally because the target was itself firing back at the submarine. Even so, however, it was often touch-and-go; and very few people ever enjoyed the fun of being fired at as much as that little Canadian girl of six, who, seeing a torpedo shimmering past the ship's side, called out, "Oh, Mummy, look at the pretty fish!" Once a fast torpedo was hit and exploded by a shell from the vessel its submarine was chasing. But this was a perfect fluke.

More to the point was the readiness of the merchantman _Valeria_ and of Commander Stockwell's destroyer to turn happy accidents to the best account on the spur of the moment. The _Valeria_ bumped over a rising submarine at three o 'clock one summer morning off the coast of Ireland. Instantly all hands ran to "action stations," when the gunner saw, to his delight, that the periscope had been broken off and so the submarine was blind. His first shot hit the hull. His second was a miss. But his third struck the base of the conning tower; on which the submarine sank, nothing but bubbles and oil remaining to mark the spot where she went down. Stockwell's adventure was rather different. He had marked a submarine slinking round in the early dawn, and, knowing the spot the Germans liked best outside of Liverpool, watched his chance over it. Suddenly he felt his destroyer being lifted up, tilted over, and slid aside. The "sub" had risen right under it! Swinging clear in a moment he let go a depth charge; and the sea-quake that followed had plenty of signs to show that the "sub" had gone down.

1917 was the great year of submarine war: the Germans straining every nerve to kill off all the ships that went to or from the Allied ports, the Allies trying their best to kill off all the submarines. The Mediterranean was bad, the North Atlantic was worse, the west coasts of the British Islands worst of all. The American Navy came in and did splendid service off the south coast of Ireland, in the Bay of Biscay, and along the North Atlantic seaways between French and British and American ports. More and more destroyers were put into service, aided by "chasers"--very much smaller vessels with only one gun and a few men, but so cheap and easily built that they could be turned out in swarms to help in worrying the submarines to death. The "scooters" and "Porte's babies," as we saw in Chapter XXIV, were, however, even better than these swarming "chasers."

The enormous steel nets were also used more than ever. You can fancy what they were like by thinking of a gigantic fishing-net many miles long, with armed steamers instead of floats. In the entrances to some harbours there were sea-gates made by swinging open a bit of the net by means of its steamers to let traffic go through, and then swinging it back again. The mine-fields were made bigger than ever; it was then that the vast one, mostly laid by the Americans, was begun from the Orkneys to Norway. Mines were also laid by British submarines and by daring fast surface mine-layers round Heligoland and other places off the German coast. In this way the waters in which submarines could work were made narrower and narrower and were better and better guarded.

But more and more submarines were launched, and they still sneaked out to sea along the Dutch and Norwegian coasts where the Navy could not stop them because they used to slink through "territorial waters," that is, within three miles of the coast, where the sea belonged to the nearest country, just the same as the land. The Navy, however, had lines of patrols always on the watch from the Orkneys to the Shetlands, on to Iceland, over to Norway, and north to the Arctic ice. The narrow waters of the English Channel were watched by the famous Dover Patrol under Sir Roger Keyes. From Folkestone to Cap Griz Nez in France there was an unbroken line of the strongest searchlights on vessels anchored to ride out the biggest gales. Seven miles west was another line. Between were hundreds of patrol boats always ready, night or day, to fire at anything on the surface or to drop depth charges on anything that dived. A depth charge is a sort of mine that can be set to go off at a certain depth, say thirty to sixty feet down, when it makes a sea-quake that knocks the submarine out of gear and sinks it, even if it does not actually hit it. Besides all these guards on the surface there were nets and mines underneath. That is why the British army in France never had its line of communication with England cut for one single day all through the war.

Now and then the Germans tried a destroyer raid from their ports on the Belgian coast, or even from their own coast; for they would sneak through Dutch waters within the three-mile limit as well as through the Danish or Norwegian. They played a game of tip-and-run, their gunners firing at any surface craft they saw (for they knew no Germans could be anywhere but underneath) and their captains streaking back home at the first sign of the British Navy. On the night of the 20th of April, 1917, they were racing back, after sinking some small craft, when an avenging flotilla of British destroyers began to overhaul them. Seeing that one of the Germans might escape in the dark, the _Broke_ (named after Captain Broke of the _Shannon_ in the War of 1812) turned and rammed her amidships. The Germans fought well, swarming aboard the _Broke_ and fighting hand to hand, as in the days of boarding. But Midshipman Giles stood up to the first of them, who was soon killed by a bluejacket's cutlass; and then, after a tremendous tussle with swords and pistols and anything else that was handy, every German was either driven overboard or killed on the spot, except two that surrendered.

A year later (on St. George's Day) the _Vindictive_ led the famous raid on Zeebrugge under Captain Carpenter, V.C. The idea was to destroy the principal German base in Belgium from which aircraft and submarines were always starting. For weeks beforehand the crews that had volunteered to go on this desperate adventure were carefully trained in secret. The plan was to block the mouth of the Bruges Canal, by sinking three vessels filled with concrete, while the _Vindictive_ smashed up the batteries on the mole (long solid wharf) guarding the entrance, and an old submarine, loaded like a gigantic torpedo, blew up the supports for the bridge that connected the mole with the land. Twice the little expedition sailed and had to put back because the wind had shifted; for the smoke screen would not hide the block ships, unless the wind had just the proper slant. At last it started for the real thing; a great night of aircraft going ahead to bomb the defences and a squadron of monitors staying some miles astern to pour in shells at the same time. The crash of air bombs and the thudding of the distant monitors were quite familiar sounds to the German garrison, whose "archies" (anti-aircraft guns) barked hoarsely back, while the bigger guns roared at where they thought the monitors might be. (Monitors are slow, strong, heavy, and very "bargy" craft, useful only as platforms for big guns against land defences.)

Suddenly, to the Germans' wild astonishment, Zeebrugge harbour was full of a smoke screen, of concrete-loaded block-ships, and of darting motor boats; while the old cruiser _Vindictive_ made straight for the mole. Instantly the monitors and aircraft were left alone, while every German gun that could be brought to bear was turned on to this new and far more dangerous enemy at hand. But the British won through. The three block-ships were sunk. The submarine used as a torpedo blew up the bridge joining the mole to the land; and the smoke screen worked fairly well. Still, the tornado of German shells was almost more than flesh and blood could stand. Meanwhile the old _Vindictive_ ran alongside the mole and dropped her eighteen special gangways bang against it. In a moment her forlorn hope--her whole crew was one great forlorn hope--swarmed on to the mole, over the splintering gangways, while her guns roared defiance at the huge German batteries. The ground swell made the _Vindictive_ roll and racked her breaking gangways terribly. The storm of German shells and the hail of machine-gun bullets seemed almost to be sweeping everything before them. An officer awaiting his turn on deck asked, "What are all those men lying down for?" and was answered, "All dead, Sir"; killed before they had started. Several gangways were smashed to pieces, the men on them falling between the _Vindictive_ and the mole. The Germans on the mole fired furiously to keep the storming party back. But, with an eager courage no Viking could have beaten, and with a trained skill no Viking could have equalled, every seaman and Marine in that heroic party who was not killed or disabled pressed on till the flaming battery was silenced. Then the survivors swarmed back with all the wounded they could find, climbed over the few broken gangways still holding together, and turned to the work of getting clear. At last the _Vindictive_, though a mere mangled wreck, got off and limped home victorious with all that was left of the equally daring flotilla of small craft.

Zeebrugge was the bigger base on the Belgian coast. But Ostend remained; and both were connected by canals with Bruges, which stood several miles inland. The whole formed a triple base shaped like the