Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

Along the railway, and on the roads at both sides of it, and across the fields beyond the roads, moved at the same time a crawling mass of people, all going in the same direction, all at about the same pace, without stopping, without talking to one another, every one of them just plodding slowly, wearily, persistently rearward. As you watched them you knew that each man had in his mind just one idea, to keep on moving like that until he knew that he was safe. There was no panic or fighting during the retreat except at isolated times and places; the situation was just this, that for the unique and imposed will that sways an army there had been substituted a multitude of individual wills all striving independently for the same end of self-preservation.

[Sidenote: People seem unaware of the others.]

These dark, sluggish streams of men and vehicles and beasts crept tortuously over the country-side like the channels of a delta trickling to the sea. Here and there little eddies of stragglers had been thrown out to each side. It is a curious thing, which I have noticed under similar conditions before, that each person or little group of persons in this mass of human beings seemed almost unaware of the presence of the rest. You would see a family party of peasants gathered round their ox cart and making a meal of bread and raw red wine without so much as a glance at the motley thousands streaming by at their elbows; a soldier would strip off his wet clothes on the road's edge to change them for some that he had looted from a wayside store with no apparent perception of the women trudging past; nor did they seem to notice him. The niceties of convention are quickly dulled by fatigue, and it is only the easefulness of modern life that makes the coarser little realities of human nature seem shocking.

[Sidenote: The crowds get clothes from stacked trucks.]

Among the trains that stretched out of sight along the line there were some trucks stacked with bundles of military mackintoshes, woolen helmets, shirts, thick socks. Some inquisitive soldier discovered these and disinterred a complete outfit for himself. A few minutes later he was a changed figure, with clean clothing in place of his own muddy, rain-soaked things, and a stiff blue mackintosh and sou'wester hat over all. The transfiguration attracted envious attention, and he was besieged with questions. Soon those trucks with their piles of white packages looked like giant sugar-basins swarming with wasps, and all around were throngs jostling one another for the next place on the heap. It was all quite good-humored; they were all laughing, waving their arms, calling to friends on the trucks to throw them a shirt or a waterproof, and when these things came flying down to them they turned away with the satisfied smile of children. Nothing puts human beings in such thoroughly good temper as to get something for nothing.

[Sidenote: A litter of old clothes on the road.]

[Sidenote: Two Italian ladies follow the track.]

In this way the whole track soon became a litter of old clothes, which the retiring soldiers trampled into the mud. Amid all this chaos one kept on meeting utterly incongruous figures, for with all the world road-worn, shabby, and dirty, to be clean and well-dressed is to be grotesque. Amid this multitude of haggard, unwashed, unshaven, dead-beat males, I noticed two Italian ladies treading delicately over the rough ballast of the railway-track. They had naturally brought with them in their flight the most valuable of their possessions, which were of a kind to be most conveniently carried on their persons. Against this gray background of mud and rubbish and a disbanded army their two figures glittered with a brilliance that would have been conspicuous in the rue de la Paix. Heavy sable furs and muffs almost bowed their shoulders; each finger had two or three rings that flashed in the light; round their necks were gold chains hung with pendants, and yet, instead of the air of self-satisfied ostentation that might well have gone with a display so lavish, there were only two pathetically little, frightened, perplexed faces, and an uncertain gait that did not promise much further progress along that ankle-wrenching railway-line.

By this time I had left the train, which had taken thirty hours to cover fifteen miles, and was walking ahead along the track. There was always the chance that something might happen to the two bridges farther on over the Tagliamento, and I wanted to be on the same side of the river as the telegraph office when that occurred.

[Sidenote: The Tagliamento bridges dominate the retirement.]

These bridges were the feature that dominated the whole movement of retirement. In military terms, they constituted a defile upon its route. Everything had to converge upon one of those three narrow passages, and until they were crossed there was no security for the Italian Army.

Rear-guard actions were, indeed, fought at intermediate places such as the line of the Torre, west of Udine, where General Petiti di Roreto made a stand with six brigades, the valley of the Judrio, the heights above Cormons. But such efforts could do no more than delay the enemy's advance; the respite that the Italian Army so urgently needed to pull itself together, to reassemble its units, redistribute its artillery, and, in short, gather into one hand again the scattered threads of control, could be found only behind the Tagliamento River, forty miles back from the old front line.

[Sidenote: Rain fills the Isonzo and holds back the enemy.]

Fortunately from Saturday night through Sunday night, the first period of the retreat of the fighting troops as distinct from the rearward services of the army, it poured torrentially with rain, and this, while increasing the hardships endured by the men, contributed in two ways to their salvation; for one thing it swelled the swift and now bridgeless Isonzo, which the enemy had to cross, brimful, and turned the Tagliamento, usually a trickle of water in an untidy stony bed across which a man can wade, into a broad deep flood; it, furthermore, kept the Austrian and German aeroplanes from following up to sweep with bomb and machine-gun the tightly packed road where they could have massacred victims by the hundred and might have turned the retreat into a hopeless rout.

Though the men exposed in open trucks or sludging along the muddy roads and swampy fields had cursed the rain bitterly, its value to our side became conspicuously plain when Monday morning broke bright with autumn sunshine.

[Sidenote: Troops fill the village of Latisana.]

It was about ten o'clock on that morning when I reached the village of Latisana, where was the southernmost bridge across the Tagliamento. The streets of the little town were simply chock-a-block with troops which were pouring into it from converging roads. Two or three Italian officers, splashed to the eyes with mud and hoarse with shouting, had organized some control at this point, or otherwise nothing would have moved at all. Pushing soldiers this way and that, seizing horses' heads, straining their voices against the din of clattering motors, they held up each stream of traffic in turn for a few minutes and passed the other through.

[Sidenote: An English soldier keeps his air of efficiency.]

[Sidenote: Men in great need of food.]

Conspicuous in his khaki among this spate of Italian gray, stood an English soldier contentedly munching dry brown bread. The motor-bicycle at his side indicated him as a despatch-rider belonging to one of the batteries. It would have been hard to say whether machine or man was the more travel-stained. The cycle's front wheel was badly bent, evidently by some collision; the soldier's hand was bound with a dirty rag, and his face clotted with the blood of a congealed scratch, the result of having been pushed off the road by a motor-lorry in the dark and falling head-long down a stone embankment. Yet about both mount and man there was still an air of efficiency and unimpaired fundamental soundness that was encouraging, and the mud-plastered figure saluted the English officer at my side with a flick of the wrist that would have passed on the parade-ground at Wellington Barracks. Two guns of his battery, he reported, were three or four miles back down the road; the men were dead-beat, but the worst was that they had had nothing to eat for thirty-six hours, owing to the tractor that had their rations on board catching fire and burning them; they had picked up scraps of bread that other troops had dropped, and some of them had tried and appreciated cutlets from a dead mule; they needed food to restore their strength for they had been working hard without sleep for two days and nights. It had been forty-eight hours of continuous hauling on those heavy guns, which were constantly getting edged off the road by other traffic, and which had to be unhitched every time the tractor stopped because it was so overloaded that it would not start with the full weight of its tow. So the officer had sent him on ahead to scout for food, and he had just found a _sosistenza_ where they had given him a sack of bread to take back.

"You all right yourself?" asked my officer-companion.

"Quite all right, sir, thank you," he answered, and slinging the bulging sack across his shoulders, the despatch-rider straddled his battered bicycle and set off on a sinuous path through the wedged traffic, with his bent front-wheel writhing like a tortured snake.

[Sidenote: Finding the way to reach Padua.]

[Sidenote: Walking single file through the mud.]

This news of the existence of a _sosistenza_ was good hearing. I myself had not the least idea of how to get to Padua, the nearest place from which I could hope to send a telegram, except by walking there; and Padua was sixty miles along the railway-line. Two days' walking, two brown loaves the gift of the Italian officer in charge of the bread-depot, and a stick of chocolate; it was a prospect of no allurement. I stepped into place in the long trail of refugees and started, however. It needed no more than two hours of stumbling over sleepers and crunching on the rough stone ballast of the track to make of me as tired and dull-witted a hobo as the rest. We all walked in single file, keeping as far as possible to a strip of soft mud at the side of the line where the going was easier, and one's whole mind had become before long entirely concentrated on nothing more than the increasing soreness of two tired feet and the gradual development of a blister on a big toe. From Portogruaro onward, however, my own personal luck changed, and by getting one lift after another I reached Padua the same night.

[Sidenote: British guns wait to cross.]

[Sidenote: An Italian colonel attempts to keep order on the bridge.]

[Sidenote: A panic is started.]

[Sidenote: Austrian aeroplanes are overhead.]

[Sidenote: Italian officers check panic.]

[Sidenote: Airplane opens fire on the road.]

Gradually the throng at the Latisana bridge increased, and eventually no less than eleven of the British guns attached to the Italian army were drawn up at the side of the road waiting their turn to cross. The English colonel who commanded the group to which they belonged had arrived and was using the funnel of the bridge to collect his scattered units. The men refreshed with the bread that they had received from the Italian food-depot, were resting by the side of the road; an Italian artillery colonel, under whose command the guns had been when on the Third Army front as corps artillery, was on the bridge trying to hold up the onpressing, unbroken string of heterogeneous traffic long enough for the English guns to be edged into the procession. Then suddenly one of these things happened to which an army in retreat is peculiarly liable. How it started no one seems to know. One theory is that Austrian soldiers dressed in Italian uniforms had been hurried on ahead by the enemy to mingle with the retreat and spread such panics. What actually happened was that several men galloped up all at once on horseback shouting, "The Austrians are here." Immediately the crowd, hitherto patiently waiting its turn to cross the bridge, made one simultaneous push toward its opening. Beyond the river there was the whole country-side to scatter over; on this side they could expect no other fate than to be caught helplessly in a trap. It was like a stampede in a burning theater; the desperate eagerness of every person in the crowd to get on the bridge stopped almost any one from getting there. Carts and people at the edge of the road were shoved down the embankment by the weight of the dense mass surging along its center. And then to add to the terror of the moment there was heard above the shouts and oaths of the struggling mob a low, foreboding hum, the characteristic drone of Austrian aeroplanes. It is hard to see what could have come of the situation but complete and bloody disaster if it had not been for the decided action of some Italian officers. By main force they thrust into the middle of the entrance to the bridge and checked the panic with sheer personal determination. The sound of their authoritative voices brought back the sense of discipline that had momentarily gone. Under their orders the pushing throng sorted itself into some order. A jibing mule was summarily shot to clear the road, and so in a few minutes, despite the constant approach of the low-flying enemy aircraft, a way was cleared for the English guns to cross the bridge. They were scarcely over when the first Austrian machine, swooping down, dropped bombs and opened fire with its machine-gun on the tight-packed road. The attack did not do much damage, though one British Red Cross car was filled as full of holes as a pepper-pot; but the experience showed how much worse the retreat would have been had not the heavy rain of the week-end kept the Austrian airmen in their hangars.

[Sidenote: The army reaches Tagliamento.]

So the retiring army reached the Tagliamento, and completed the first stage of its retreat. Once behind that barrier the Italians could be sure of a certain breathing space, but to secure its protection was the most difficult part of their rearward movement. To the constant convergence which the lack of more than three bridges rendered necessary must be attributed much of the confusion of the retirement and the abandonment of the military equipment that was still to the east of the Tagliamento when the pressure of the enemy finally compelled their destruction.

[Sidenote: Germans try to cross the upper course of Tagliamento.]

[Sidenote: Enemies who cross are killed or captured.]

The Germans fully realized the formidable obstacle to the retreat of the Italians which this rain-swollen river constituted, and they made a determined effort to secure for themselves a passage across its upper course while the Second and Third Armies to the south were not yet behind the stream. There is a bridge a few miles west of the town of Gemona which was not being used by the retreating army because of its comparatively flimsy construction. The Tagliamento, then very high, was, like many mountain streams, subject to very rapid rises and falls. Therefore, part of the enemy advance-guard, which was following up the Italian retirement was pushed on ahead to try to obtain control of this bridge at Gemona, for use at any rate when the waters had sunk a little. This German detachment forced its way across the bridge with considerable courage, some of them being swept away by the swift stream pouring over it, but on the other bank they were immediately faced with stout resistance by the Italian rear-guard, and with their backs to the river virtually all the enemy who had crossed the Tagliamento were killed or captured.

[Sidenote: Gallant conduct of the rear-guard.]

The gallant and skilful conduct of the rear-guard of the Italian army is, indeed, the brightest part of the gloomy story of the retreat.

[Sidenote: The Italian armies are on the defensive.]

[Sidenote: The war now a struggle against invaders.]

The cavalry, specially, played a distinguished part in covering the retirement. Charging machine-guns with the lance, and holding commanding positions until they were virtually cut off, these regiments had very heavy losses. A retreat where circumstances make it impossible to get the whole of the army away imposes upon the rear-guard a call for special self-sacrifice, since the moment never comes, when, the whole of the main body being safely past, it can break off the combat and itself retire, its duty done. In the withdrawal of the armies that were along the front in the Cadore and Carnic Alps, occasions of this kind occurred several times during the week throughout which the retreat lasted, when rear-guard detachments were completely surrounded. At Lorenzago a force in this position succeeded in cutting its way back to join the main body again; west of Gemona, however, the remnants of the Thirty-sixth Division were so thoroughly engulfed by the advancing Austro-German forces that, having used up all their ammunition, they were obliged to surrender. And so, gradually, not without moments of discouragement almost amounting to despair, the Italian armies, which ten days before had been fighting on Austrian territory with every prospect of carrying still further a series of victories that had lasted two years and a half, found themselves on the defensive far back of their own borders, awaiting the attack of a triumphant and advancing foe. It had been a terrible trial for them and for the nation at their back. Almost in one night, dreams of imperial expansion, cherished with an enthusiasm that gave them an air of virtual reality, faded into a remoteness beyond reckoning. The war that had been from the first gloriously offensive, was suddenly transformed into an outnumbered struggle against invaders who had already seized half of one of the richest provinces of Italy. Yet, though numbed by the shock and stricken to the heart by the realization of her disaster, Italy reacted well. There was no talk of yielding to be heard, only anxious discussion of the best means of organizing the further resistance that would so soon be necessary.

For though the great majority of the Italian army had succeeded for the moment in escaping from the grasp of the Austro-Germans, the enemy was steadfastly pursuing. Encouraged by a victory that must have more than realized his most ambitious hopes, reinforced by captured guns and material, he would wait only long enough to get sufficient strength into position before hurling the whole of his weight once more against the Italian line.

[Sidenote: Impossible to meet the second shock on the Tagliamento.]

To meet this second shock on the Tagliamento was not possible. The river itself quickly became, as the rain stopped and the waters fell, too easily traversable an obstacle to be worth fortifying. The line which it would have imposed upon the Italian army was, moreover, too long to be held in the depth desirable for resistance to the attack of superior numbers. So the Tagliamento was occupied as an intermediate position only long enough to shield the further retreat of the army and its transport behind the broader and deeper stream of the Piave.

[Sidenote: The new stand behind the Piave.]

[Sidenote: Winter rains will delay enemy's heavy guns.]

Here at the time of writing the Italian forces are in position and the enemy's advanced detachments have begun to register ranges and destroy possible observation posts across the river with such artillery as they have so far had the time to bring up. Whether the Piave line and the rest of the Italian front to the westward, which has had to be modified in conformation with the general movement of retreat, can be held indefinitely, will probably be a question of heavy guns. If the enemy can bring up his larger artillery before reinforcements of the same character arrive from France and England, a further retreat from north and east to another river line may well be necessary. Fortunately the winter rains that have set in make for delay in the arrival of such cumbrous war-engines as the Austrian seventeen-inch mortars, and it may be that persistent mud and rain will compel the Austrians to be satisfied with holding the considerable tract of territory that they have won.

[Sidenote: Danger that Venice must be abandoned.]

[Sidenote: Cathedrals and palaces are protected by sand bags.]

But all preparations are being made to face the conceivable eventuality of another retirement. The most serious consequence that this would entail would be the abandonment of Venice and the necessity of bringing that inestimable city within close range of the destruction of war. Even at this early stage, therefore, while the danger to Venice is as yet not urgent, the Italian Government is doing its best to surround her with the protection of such neutrality as the conventions of war, for what they are worth, secure to undefended and unoccupied towns. No person in uniform is allowed to enter the place and the civilian population is being encouraged to leave by free railway transport and subventions to support them until they can settle elsewhere. Even in such tragic hours Venice keeps up her old tradition of light-heartedness. The cafés round the great piazza are full in the evenings with a cheerful crowd. Moreover, to go into St. Mark's is to enter a sort of neolithic grotto; the pillars, set about with sand-bags, have the girth of the arcades of a Babylonian temple; bulging poultices of sacks protect each fresco; as a building it reminds one of a German student padded for a duel. The Doge's Palace, too, is more hidden with scaffolding than it could have been when it was being built; each of those delicate columns of different design is set around with a stout palisade of timber balks. Venice, indeed, looks like a drawing-room with the dust-sheets on the furniture and the chandeliers in bags, and to complete the parallel, the family is going away before one's eyes.

Sad days for Italy, days unimaginable a month ago. There must, indeed, be virtue in the Allies' cause since such ordeals as these still leave our courage high.

Copyright, Century, March, 1918.

* * * * *

The bottling up of the Harbor of Zeebrugge and the attempted closing of the Harbor of Ostend formed what was probably the most brilliant single naval exploit of the war. These daring and successful attempts are described in the narrative following.

BOTTLING UP ZEEBRUGGE AND OSTEND

THE OFFICIAL NARRATIVE

[Sidenote: The _Vindictive_ as she lies in Ostend Harbor.]

Those who recall High Wood upon the Somme--and they must be many, as it was after the battles of 1916--may easily figure to themselves the decks of H.M.S. _Vindictive_ as she lies to-day, a stark, black profile, against the sea haze of the harbor amid the stripped, trim shapes of the fighting ships which throng these waters. That wilderness of debris, that litter of the used and broken tools of war, lavish ruin and that prodigal evidence of death and battle, are as obvious and plentiful here as there. The ruined tank nosing at the stout tree which stopped it has its parallel in the flame-thrower hut at the port wing of _Vindictive's_ bridge, its iron sides freckled with rents from machine-gun bullets and shell-splinters; the tall white cross which commemorates the martyrdom of the Londoners is sister to the dingy, pierced White Ensign which floated over the fight of the Zeebrugge Mole.

[Sidenote: The _Iris_ and the _Daffodil_ which shared the honors.]

Looking aft from the chaos of her wrecked bridge, one sees, snug against their wharf, the heroic bourgeois shapes of the two Liverpool ferry-boats (their captains' quarters are still labelled "Ladies Only") _Iris_ and _Daffodil_, which shared with _Vindictive_ the honors and ardors of the fight. The epic of their achievement shapes itself in the light of that view across the scarred and littered decks, in that environment of gray water and great still ships.

[Sidenote: The three cruisers that were sunk at Zeebrugge.]

Their objectives were the canal of Zeebrugge and the entrance to the harbor of Ostend--theirs, and those of five other veteran and obsolete cruisers and a mosquito fleet of destroyers, motor-launches and coastal motor-boats. Three of the cruisers, _Intrepid_, _Iphigenia_ and _Thetis_, each duly packed with concrete and with mines attached to her bottom for the purpose of sinking her, _Merrimac_-fashion, in the neck of the canal, were aimed at Zeebrugge; two others, similarly prepared, were directed at Ostend. The function of _Vindictive_, with her ferry-boats, was to attack the great half-moon Mole which guards the Zeebrugge Canal, land bluejackets and marines upon it, destroy what stores, guns, and Germans she could find, and generally create a diversion while the block-ships ran in and sank themselves in their appointed place. Vice Admiral Keyes, in the destroyer _Warwick_, commanded the operation.

[Sidenote: The conditions favorable for the attack.]

There had been two previous attempts at the attack, capable of being pushed home if weather and other conditions had served. The night of the 22nd offered nearly all the required conditions, and at some fifteen miles off Zeebrugge the ships took up their formation for the attack. _Vindictive_, which had been towing _Iris_ and _Daffodil_, cast them off to follow under their own steam; _Intrepid_, _Iphigenia_, and _Thetis_ slowed down to give the first three time to get alongside the Mole; _Sirius_ and _Brilliant_ shifted their course for Ostend; and the great swarm of destroyers and motor craft sowed themselves abroad upon their multifarious particular duties. The night was overcast and there was a drift of haze; down the coast a great searchlight swung its beams to and fro; there was a small wind and a short sea.

[Sidenote: The _Vindictive_ heads for the Mole.]

[Sidenote: The wind helps make a smoke-screen.]

From _Vindictive's_ bridge, as she headed in towards the Mole with her faithful ferry-boats at her heels, there was scarcely a glimmer of light to be seen shorewards. Ahead of her, as she drove through the water, rolled the smoke-screen, her cloak of invisibility, wrapped about her by the small craft. This was a device of Wing-Commander Brock, R.N.A.S., "without which," acknowledges the Admiral in Command, "the operation could not have been conducted." The north-east wind moved the volume of it shoreward ahead of the ships; beyond it, the distant town and its defenders were unsuspicious; and it was not till _Vindictive_, with her bluejackets and marines standing ready for the landing, was close upon the Mole that the wind lulled and came away again from the south-west, sweeping back the smoke-screen and laying her bare to the eyes that looked seaward.

[Sidenote: The star shells discover the ships and battle opens.]

[Sidenote: The _Vindictive_ reaches the Mole.]

There was a moment immediately afterwards when it seemed to those in the ships as if the dim coast and the hidden harbor exploded into light. A star shell soared aloft, then a score of star shells; the wavering beams of the searchlights swung round and settled to a glare; the wildfire of gun flashes leaped against the sky; strings of luminous green beads shot aloft, hung and sank; and the darkness of the night was supplanted by the nightmare daylight of battle fires. Guns and machine-guns along the Mole and batteries ashore woke to life, and it was in a gale of shelling that _Vindictive_ laid her nose against the thirty-foot high concrete side of the Mole, let go an anchor, and signed to _Daffodil_ to shove her stern in. _Iris_ went ahead and endeavored to get alongside likewise.

[Sidenote: Captain Carpenter in the flame-thrower hut.]

The fire, from the account of everybody concerned, was intense. While ships plunged and rolled beside the Mole in an unexpected send of sea, _Vindictive_ with her greater draught jarring against the foundation of the Mole with every plunge, they were swept diagonally by machine-gun fire from both ends of the Mole and by heavy batteries ashore. Commander A.F.B. Carpenter (now Captain) conned _Vindictive_ from her open bridge till her stern was laid in, when he took up his position in the flame-thrower hut on the port side. It is to this hut that reference has already been made; it is marvellous that any occupant of it should have survived a minute, so riddled and shattered is it. Officers of _Iris_, which was in trouble ahead of _Vindictive_, describe Captain Carpenter as "handling her like a picket-boat."

[Sidenote: The _Vindictive's_ false high deck and gangways.]

_Vindictive_ was fitted along the port side with a high false deck, whence ran the eighteen brows, or gangways, by which the storming and demolition parties were to land. The men were gathered in readiness on the main and lower decks, while Colonel Elliot, who was to lead the Marines, waited on the false deck just abaft the bridge, and Captain H.C. Halahan, who commanded the bluejackets, was amidships. The gangways were lowered, and scraped and rebounded upon the high parapet of the Mole as _Vindictive_ rolled; and the word for the assault had not yet been given when both leaders were killed, Colonel Elliot by a shell and Captain Halahan by the machine-gun fire which swept the decks. The same shell that killed Colonel Elliot also did fearful execution in the forward Stokes Mortar Battery.

[Sidenote: Landing on the Mole.]

"The men were magnificent." Every officer bears the same testimony. The mere landing on the Mole was a perilous business; it involved a passage across the crashing, splintering gangways, a drop over the parapet into the field of fire of the German machine-guns which swept its length, and a further drop of some sixteen feet to the surface of the Mole itself. Many were killed and more were wounded as they crowded up to the gangways; but nothing hindered the orderly and speedy landing by every gangway.

Lieutenant H.T.C. Walker had his arm carried away by a shell on the upper deck and lay in the darkness while the storming parties trod him under. He was recognized and dragged aside by the Commander. He raised his remaining arm in greeting, "Good luck to you," he called, as the rest of the stormers hastened by; "good luck."

[Sidenote: The wounded and dying cheer.]

The lower deck was a shambles as the Commander made the rounds of his ship; yet those wounded and dying raised themselves to cheer as he made his tour. The crew of the howitzer which was mounted forward had all been killed; a second crew was destroyed likewise; and even then a third crew was taking over the gun. In the stern cabin a firework expert, who had never been to sea before--one of Captain Brock's employees--was steadily firing great illuminating rockets out of a scuttle to show up the lighthouse on the end of the Mole to the block ships and their escort.

[Sidenote: The _Daffodil's_ part in the fight.]

The _Daffodil_, after aiding to berth _Vindictive_, should have proceeded to land her own men, but now Commander Carpenter ordered her to remain as she was, with her bows against _Vindictive's_ quarter, pressing the latter ship into the Mole. Normally, _Daffodil's_ boilers develop eighty pounds' pressure of steam per inch; but now, for this particular task, Artificer Engineer Button, in charge of them maintained a hundred and sixty pounds for the whole period that she was holding _Vindictive_ to the Mole. Her casualties, owing to her position during the fight, were small--one man killed and eight wounded, among them her Commander, Lieutenant H. Campbell, who was struck in the right eye by a shell splinter.

[Sidenote: The _Iris_ finds her work difficult.]

_Iris_ had troubles of her own. Her first attempts to make fast to the Mole ahead of _Vindictive_ failed, as her grapnels were not large enough to span the parapet. Two officers. Lieutenant Commander Bradford and Lieutenant Hawkins, climbed ashore and sat astride the parapet trying to make the grapnels fast till each was killed and fell down between the ship and the wall. Commander Valentine Gibbs had both legs shot away and died next morning. Lieutenant Spencer, B.N.R., though wounded, conned the ship and Lieutenant Henderson, R.N., came up from aft and took command.

[Sidenote: Terrible casualties on the _Iris_.]

_Iris_ was obliged at last to change her position and fall in astern of _Vindictive_, and suffered very heavily from the fire. A single big shell plunged through the upper deck and burst below at a point where fifty-six marines were waiting the order to go to the gang-ways. Forty-nine were killed and the remaining seven wounded. Another shell in the ward-room, which was serving as sick bay, killed four officers and twenty-six men. Her total casualties were eight officers and sixty-nine men killed and three officers and a hundred and two men wounded.

[Sidenote: The demolition parties on the Mole dynamite buildings.]

The storming and demolition parties upon the Mole met with no resistance from the Germans, other than the intense and unremitting fire. The geography of the great Mole, with its railway line and its many buildings, hangars, and store-sheds, was already well known, and the demolition parties moved to their appointed work in perfect order. One after another the building burst into flame or split and crumpled as the dynamite went off.

[Sidenote: The enemy fights with the machine-guns.]

A bombing party, working up towards the Mole extension in search of the enemy, destroyed several machine-gun emplacements, but not a single prisoner rewarded them. It appears that upon the approach of the ships, and with the opening of the fire, the enemy simply retired and contented themselves with bringing machine-guns to the shore end of the Mole. And while they worked and destroyed, the covering party below the parapet could see in the harbor, by the light of the German star shells, the shapes of the block ships stealing in and out of their own smoke and making for the mouth of the canal.

[Sidenote: The _Thetis_ shows the road to all the ships.]

_Thetis_ came first, steaming into a tornado of shell from the great batteries ashore. All her crew, save a remnant who remained to steam her in and sink her, had already been taken off by the ubiquitous motor launches, but the remnant spared hands enough to keep her four guns going. It was hers to show the road to _Intrepid_ and _Iphigenia_, who followed.

[Sidenote: The _Thetis_ is sunk.]

She cleared the string of armed barges which defends the channel from the tip of the Mole, but had the ill-fortune to foul one of her propellers upon the net defence which flanks it on the shore side. The propeller gathered in the net and rendered her practically unmanageable; the shore batteries found her and pounded her unremittingly; she bumped into a bank, edged off, and found herself in the channel again, still some hundreds of yards from the mouth of the canal, in a practically sinking condition. As she lay she signalled invaluable directions to the others, and here Commander R.S. Sneyd, D.S.O., accordingly blew the charges and sank her. A motor launch, under Lieutenant H. Littleton, R.N.V.R., raced alongside and took off her crew. Her losses were five killed and five wounded.

[Sidenote: The _Intrepid_ follows.]

_Intrepid_, smoking like a volcano and with all her guns blazing, followed; her motor launch had failed to get alongside outside the harbor, and she had men enough for anything. Straight into the canal she steered, her smoke blowing back from her into _Iphigenia's_ eyes, so that the latter, blinded and going a little wild, rammed a dredger with a barge moored beside it, which lay at the western arm of the canal. She got clear though, and entered the canal pushing the barge before her. It was then that a shell hit the steam connections of her whistle, and the escape of steam which followed drove off some of the smoke and let her see what she was doing.

[Sidenote: Sinking of the _Intrepid_ and the _Iphigenia_.]

Lieutenant Stuart Bonham-Carter, commanding the _Intrepid_, placed the nose of his ship neatly on the mud of the western bank, ordered his crew away, and blew up his ship by the switches in the chart-room. Four dull bumps was all that could be heard; and immediately afterwards there arrived on deck the engineer, who had been in the engine-room during the explosion and reported that all was as it should be.

[Sidenote: Probable that the canal is effectively blocked.]

Lieutenant E.W. Billyard-Leake, commanding _Iphigenia_, beached her according to arrangement on the eastern side, blew her up, saw her drop nicely across the canal, and left her with her engines still going to hold her in position till she should have bedded well down on the bottom. According to latest reports from air observation, the two old ships with their holds full of concrete are lying across the canal in a V position; and it is probable that the work they set out to do has been accomplished and that the canal is effectively blocked.

A motor launch, under Lieutenant P.T. Deane, R.N.V.R., had followed them in to bring away the crews, and waited further up the canal towards the mouth against the western bank. Lieutenant Bonham-Carter, having sent away his boats, was reduced to a Carley float, an apparatus like an exaggerated lifebuoy with a floor of grating. Upon contact with the water it ignited a calcium flare, and he was adrift in the uncanny illumination with a German machine-gun a few hundred yards away giving him its undivided attention.

What saved him was possibly the fact that the defunct _Intrepid_ was still emitting huge clouds of smoke, which it had been worth nobody's while to turn off. He managed to catch a rope as the motor launch started, and was towed for a while till he was observed and taken on board. Another officer jumped ashore and ran along the bank to the launch. A bullet from the machine-gun stung him as he ran, and when he arrived, charging down the bank out of the dark, he was received by a number of the launch's crew who attacked him with a hammer.

[Sidenote: Shells make incessant geysers in the harbor.]

The whole harbor was alive with small craft. As the motor launch cleared the canal, and came forth to the incessant geysers thrown up by the shells, rescuers and rescued had a view of yet another phase of the attack. The shore end of the Mole consists of a jetty, and here an old submarine, commanded by Lieutenant R.D. Sandford, R.N., loaded with explosives, was run into the piles and touched off, her crew getting away in a boat to where the usual launch awaited them.

[Sidenote: An old submarine is blown up.]

Officers describe the explosion as the greatest they ever witnessed--a huge roaring spout of flame that tore the jetty in half and left a gap of over 100 feet. The claim of another launch to have sunk a torpedo-boat alongside the jetty is supported by many observers, including officers of the _Vindictive_, who had seen her mast and funnel across the Mole and noticed them disappear.

[Sidenote: The splendid heroism of men and officers.]

Where every moment had its deed and every deed its hero, a recital of acts of valor becomes a mere catalogue. "The men were magnificent," say the officers; the men's opinion of their leaders expresses itself in the manner in which they followed them, in their cheers, in their demeanor to-day while they tidy up their battered ships, setting aside the inevitable souvenirs, from the bullet-torn engines to great chunks of Zeebrugge Mole dragged down and still hanging in the fenders of the _Vindictive_. The motor launch from the canal cleared the end of the Mole and there beheld, trim and ready, the shape of the _Warwick_, with the great silk flag presented to the Admiral by the officers of his old ship, the _Centurion_. They stood up on the crowded decks of the little craft and cheered it again and again.

[Sidenote: The _Warwick_ takes off the men from the canal.]

While the _Warwick_ took them on board, they saw _Vindictive_, towed loose from the Mole by _Daffodil_, turn and make for home--a great black shape, with funnels gapped and leaning out of the true, flying a vast streamer of flame as her stokers worked her up--her, the almost wreck--to a final display of seventeen knots. Her forward funnel was a sieve; her decks were a dazzle of sparks; but she brought back intact the horseshoe nailed to it, which Sir Roger Keyes had presented to her commander.

[Sidenote: One destroyer, the _North Star_, is sunk.]

[Sidenote: Monitors and siege guns bombard the enemy.]

Meantime the destroyers _North Star_, _Phoebe_, and _Warwick_, which guarded the _Vindictive_ from action by enemy destroyers while she lay beside the Mole, had their share in the battle. _North Star_, losing her way in the smoke, emerged to the light of the star-shells, and was sunk. The German _communiqué_, which states that only a few members of the crew could be saved by them, is in this detail of an unusual accuracy, for the _Phoebe_ came up under a heavy fire in time to rescue nearly all. Throughout the operations monitors and the siege guns in Flanders, manned by the Royal Marine Artillery, heavily bombarded the enemy's batteries.

[Sidenote: The attack on Ostend.]

The wind that blew back the smoke-screen at Zeebrugge served us even worse off Ostend, where that and nothing else prevented the success of an operation ably directed by Commodore Hubert Lynes, C.M.G. The coastal motor boats had lit the approaches and the ends of the piers with calcium flares and made a smoke-cloud which effectually hid the fact from the enemy. _Sirius_ and _Brilliant_ were already past the Stroom Bank buoy when the wind changed, revealing the arrangements to the enemy, who extinguished the flares with gunfire.

[Sidenote: The _Sirius_ runs aground.]

The _Sirius_ was already in a sinking condition when at length the two ships, having failed to find the entrance, grounded, and were forced therefore to sink themselves at a point about four hundred yards east of the piers, and their crews were taken off by motor launches.

[Sidenote: Operations cannot be rehearsed.]

The difficulty of the operation is to be gauged from the fact that from Zeebrugge to Ostend the enemy batteries number not less than 120 heavy guns, which can concentrate on retiring ships, during daylight, up to a distance of about sixteen miles. This imposes as a condition of success that the operation must be carried out at night, and not late in the night. It must take place at high water, with the wind from the right quarter, and with a calm sea for the small craft. The operation cannot be rehearsed beforehand, since the essence of it is secrecy, and though one might have to wait a long time to realize all the essential conditions of wind and weather, secrecy wears badly when large numbers of men are brought together in readiness for the attack.

[Sidenote: The _Vindictive_ makes for Ostend.]

The _Sirius_ lies in the surf some two thousand yards east of the entrance to Ostend Harbor, which she failed so gallantly to block; and when, in the early hours of yesterday morning, the _Vindictive_ groped her way through the smoke-screen and headed for the entrance, it was as though the old fighting-ship awoke and looked on. A coastal motor-boat had visited her and hung a flare in her slack and rusty rigging; and that eye of unsteady fire, paling in the blaze of the star-shells or reddening through the drift of the smoke, watched the whole great enterprise, from the moment when it hung in doubt to its ultimate triumphant success.

[Sidenote: Unforeseen conditions add to the difficulties.]

[Sidenote: German destroyers guard the coast.]

The planning and execution of that success had been entrusted by the Vice-Admiral, Sir Roger Keyes, to Commodore Hubert Lynes, C.M.G., who directed the previous attempt to block the harbor with _Sirius_ and _Brilliant_. Upon that occasion, a combination of unforeseen, and unforeseeable, conditions had fought against him; upon this, the main problem was to secure the effect of a surprise attack upon an enemy who was clearly, from his ascertained dispositions, expecting him. _Sirius_ and _Brilliant_ had been baffled by the displacement of the Stroom Bank buoy, which marks the channel to the harbor entrance, but since then aerial reconnaissance had established that the Germans had removed the buoy altogether and that there were now no guiding marks of any kind. They had also cut gaps in the piers as a precaution against a landing; and, further, when towards midnight on Thursday the ships moved from their anchorage, it was known that some nine German destroyers were out and at large upon the coast. The solution of the problem is best indicated by the chronicle of the event.

[Sidenote: A still sea and no moon.]

It was a night that promised well for the enterprise--nearly windless, and what little breeze stirred came from a point or so west of north; a sky of lead-blue, faintly star-dotted, and no moon; a still sea for the small craft, the motor-launches and the coastal motor-boats, whose work is done close in shore. From the destroyer which served the Commodore for flagship, the remainder of the force was visible only as swift silhouettes of blackness, destroyers bulking like cruisers in the darkness, motor-launches like destroyers, and coastal motor-boats showing themselves as racing hillocks of foam. From Dunkirk, a sudden and brief flurry of gunfire announced that German aeroplanes were about--they were actually on their way to visit Calais; and over the invisible coast of Flanders the summer-lightning of the restless artillery rose and fell monotonously.

[Sidenote: _Vindictive_ passes.]

"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.]

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_.]

There were motor-boats to either side of her, escorting her to the entrance, and these were supplied with what are called Dover flares--enormous lights capable of illuminating square miles of sea at once. A "Very" pistol was fired as a signal to light these; but the fog and the smoke together were too dense for even the flares. _Vindictive_ then put her helm over and started to cruise to find the entrance. Twice in her wanderings she must have passed across it, and at her third turn, upon reaching the position at which she had first lost her way, there came a rift in the mist, and she saw the entrance clear, the piers to either side and the opening dead ahead. The inevitable motor-boat dashed up, raced on into the opening under a heavy and momentarily growing fire, and planted a flare on the water between the piers. _Vindictive_ steamed over it and on. She was in.

[Sidenote: A hail of lead falls upon the _Vindictive_.]

The guns found her at once. She was hit every few seconds after she entered, her scarred hull broken afresh in a score of places and her decks and upper works swept. The machine-gun on the end of the western pier had been put out of action by the motor-boat's torpedo, but from other machine-guns at the inshore ends of the pier, from a position on the front, and from machine-guns apparently firing over the eastern pier, there converged upon her a hail of lead. The after-control was demolished by a shell which killed all its occupants. Upper and lower bridges and chart-room were swept by bullets, and Commander Godsal, R.N., ordered his officers to go with him to the conning-tower.

[Sidenote: The _Vindictive_ prepares to turn.]