Lieutenant-Commander Rosoman, in spite of his wounds, accompanied me to the conning tower. He absolutely refused to sit down, but remained standing so that he could keep a lookout through the slit in the armour.
The conning tower was of very small dimensions. Four wounded men had previously crawled inside and had died where they lay. Three or four other wounded men had crawled in later on and had collapsed. One of the telegraphs to the engine-room had been shot away, but the telephone was intact.
All the other compasses having been destroyed, we had to depend upon the conning-tower compass. The magnetic directive force on a compass needle is necessarily very weak in a conning tower of such small dimensions. The ship had received so many hard knocks that the magnetism on board was pretty certain to have undergone considerable change. Thus, whereas this particular compass was somewhat independable before, it was now exceedingly unreliable.
In spite of the many hundreds of times that I must previously have instructed young officers that no iron should be placed within five feet of the compass, I have my first lieutenant to thank for pointing out that the presence of so many steel helmets in the conning tower was inadvisable.
Daffodil was ordered to tow Vindictive's bow away from the wall. Lieutenant Campbell obeyed at once; our anchor cable was slipped overboard. Directly after the strain came on the Daffodil's hawser the latter broke, but it had served its purpose. "Full speed ahead" was ordered and the ship moved forward almost immediately. This was at 1.11 A.M.
A large steel boom—the original mainmast of the ship—had been rigged over the port side of the quarter-deck, jutting out rather further than the port propeller with the object of saving the latter from hitting the wall. When Vindictive's helm was put over to port, her stern swung towards the Mole, but the boom saved the situation as a result of a heavy blow against the wall.
As soon as Vindictive had moved a few feet the gangways slipped off the wall and fell overboard with a resounding crash. For a few moments the wreckage fouled and stopped the port propeller, but quickly cleared again without having done any serious damage.
The German's Last Straw
It is not difficult to gauge the feelings of the enemy when they first noticed the ship moving off. We had taken them more or less by surprise on arrival and had managed to storm the Mole in spite of every effort to prevent us. The enemy could not have been over-pleased about that. The ship had been able to remain at the Mole for one hour and ten minutes without sustaining any vital damage. That fact was not calculated to engender a pleasant frame of mind amongst the enemy. But they knew exactly where we were. They knew we should endeavour to leave sooner or later; they knew that any attempt to do so would inevitably expose the vitals of the ship to their batteries at point-blank range; they thought they knew that our fate was sealed immediately we were clear of the wall; there could be no surprise about leaving. But all such matters had been carefully thought out beforehand. Vindictive, Iris, and Daffodil each carried several sets of artificial smoke apparatus for use on retirement. Immediately we started to go ahead orders were given for the smoke to be turned on. In less than a minute all previous fog records were beaten beyond comparison. Thus in place of a victim the enemy found a fog.
We steamed away to the northwestward at utmost speed. The flames were pouring through the holes in the funnels; the ship had the appearance of being heavily on fire. The wind being now offshore brought the fog along with us; fortunately for the navigation we had a clear lookout ahead. The enemy cannot have seen much more than the vivid glare of our funnel flames illuminating the upper part of the fog. From all accounts their batteries were far from idle. As the ship sped seaward we had the sensation of the ship jumping at irregular but frequent intervals. This may have been due to the concussion of heavy shell striking the water near the ship. Whether any shell hit us or not during the retirement is unlikely to be known. One could hardly see one's own feet. The ship had already been hit so often that any further damage of the same description would hardly have been noticed. Suffice it to say that no vital damage to the hull was received.