To Kiel in the 'Hercules'

THE THREE ADMIRALS: REAR ADMIRAL ROBINSON, U. S. N. (LEFT), VICE ADMIRAL BROWNING, R. N. (CENTER), REAR ADMIRAL GROSSET (FRENCH) (RIGHT)
TO KIEL IN THE HERCULES
BY LIEUT. LEWIS R. FREEMAN, R. N. V. R. Official Correspondent with the Grand Fleet, and Member of Staff of Allied Naval Armistice Commission
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1919
Copyright, 1919 By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK

The Regensburg has been calling us for some time, said the chief signal officer as he came down for his belated watch luncheon in the ward-room, and it looks as though we might expect to see her come nosing up out of the mist any time after two o'clock. She excuses herself for being late at the rendezvous by saying that the fog has been so thick in the Bight that she had to anchor during the night. It's not any too good a prospect for a look-see at Heligoland, for our course hardly takes us within three miles of it at the nearest.
It was in a fog that the Hercules had dropped down through the moored lines of the Grand Fleet the previous morning, it was in a fog that she had felt her way out of the Firth of Forth and by devious mine-swept channels to the North Sea, and it was still in a fog that she—the first surface warship of the Allies to penetrate deeply into them since the Battle of the Bight, not long after the outbreak of the war—was approaching German waters. Indeed, the whole last act of the great naval drama—from the coming of the Königsberg to the Forth, with a delegation to receive the terms of surrender, to the incomparable pageant of the surrender itself—had been played out behind the fitful and uncertain raisings and lowerings of a fog-curtain; and now the epilogue—wherein there was promise that much, if not all, that had remained a mystery throughout the unfolding of the war drama itself should be finally revealed—was being held up through the wilfulness of this same perverse scene-shifter. The light cruiser, Regensburg , which, according to plan, was to have met us at nine that morning at a rendezvous suggested by the German Naval Staff, and pilot the Hercules through the mine-fields, had not been sighted by early afternoon. Numerous floating mines, rolling lazily in the bow-wave spreading to port and starboard and ogling us with leering, moon-faced impudence in the fog, had been sighted since daybreak, auguring darkly of the explosive barrier through which we were passing by the safe course the Germans (in lieu of the promised charts which had failed to arrive) had advised us by wireless to follow.