eastward amid scattered columns of foam from falling shells, and as they turned to cut off the enemy from his base the destroyers went past, their bows buried in spray, smoke swallowing the frayed white ensigns fluttering aft. In a minute they had vanished in smoke, out of which guns spat viciously, leaving a tangle of little creaming wakes to mark the path of their headlong onslaught.
Neck and neck raced the retreating raiders and the avenging Nemesis from the east coast of Britain. Ahead lay the German minefields and German submarines and the tardy support of the German High Seas Fleet. Somewhere far astern a huddle of nervous merchantmen were being hustled westward by their escort, and midway between the two the hostile destroyer flotillas fought in a desperate death-grapple under the misty blue sky.
When at length the British light cruisers hauled off and ceased fire on the fringe of the{60} German minefields, the enemy were hull down over the horizon, leaving two destroyers sinking amid a swirl of oil and wreckage, and a cruiser on her beam ends ablaze from bow to stern. The sea was dotted with specks of forlorn humanity clinging to spars and rafts. Boats from the British destroyers plied to and fro among them, bent on the quixotic old-fashioned task of succouring a beaten foe. Those not actively engaged in this work of mercy circled round at high speed to fend off submarine attack; the light cruisers stayed by to discourage the advances of a pair of Zeppelins which arrived from the eastward in time to drop bombs on the would-be rescuers of their gasping countrymen.
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The bowman of a destroyer’s whaler disengaged his boathook from the garments of a water-logged Teuton, grasped his late enemy by the collar and hauled him spluttering into the boat with a single powerful heave of his right arm.
All about them cutters and whalers rising and falling on the swell were quickly being laden to the gunwales with scalded, bleeding, half-drowned prisoners. A midshipman in the stern of a cutter was waving a bedraggled German ensign and half-tearfully entreating his crew to stop gaping at the Zeppelins and{61} attend to orders. The barking of the light cruisers’ high-angle guns was punctuated by the whinny of falling bombs and pieces of shrapnel that whipped the surface of the sea into spurts of foam. In the background the sinking cruiser blazed sullenly, the shells in her magazine exploding like gigantic Chinese crackers.
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