To complete the victory of this single-ship action everyone on board had contributed his utmost, but it seems probable that in history the larger share of the credit will be given unstintingly to the engineers and stokers. It was certainly bestowed on them by their comrades in the Kent. "The captain," we are told, "nearly fell on the engineer-commander's neck and kissed him when he 'blew up' after the action to see him and to advise as to the best speed to go back to harbour. He nearly shouted at him for some time: 'My dear fellow, my dear engineer-commander! You won the action, you did it splendid! Without your speed we should have lost everything.'"
Meanwhile, at Port Stanley, now in wireless communication with all the rest of Admiral Sturdee's squadron, the silence of the Kent, owing to her broken wireless, had begun to give rise to some alarm. "Kent, Kent, Kent" rang the invisible call, but there was no reply, and it was feared that she had been lost. It was perhaps characteristic that, in spite of this, she was the first of them all to reach port the next day. Of von Spee's squadron only the Dresden remained, to be run to earth three months later. The Bristol and Macedonia, after capturing their crews, had sunk the Santa Isabel and the Baden; and the total British casualties in killed and wounded amounted to less than thirty.
CHAPTER V
BACK TO THE NORTH SEA
"Our trawlers mined the fairway.
Our cruisers spread the bait,
We shelled the Briton's seaside towns
To lure him to his fate,
We set the trap twice over.
We left him with his dead—"
"But now we'll play another game,"
The British sailor said.
With the destruction of von Spee's squadron nothing of Germany's navy was left at large in the outer seas save one or two cruisers and armed merchantmen, whose days of freedom were already numbered. Of these the survivor of the Falkland Islands' Battle, the Dresden, was destroyed in the following March at Juan Fernandez; the Königsberg, bottled up in the Rufiji River in Africa, was finally disposed of a few months later; while the Kronprinz Wilhelm, the Prinz Eitel Friedrick, and the Karlsrühe met with various fates during the same summer. That in spite of the enormous calls upon the navy in the way of convoying transports they were joined by no others from their home waters is the best tribute to the efficiency of our floating cordon in the North Sea. And yet its very success in this respect was largely responsible, perhaps, for a somewhat distorted picture of the actual position—that of a sulky and immobilized German Fleet confronted with an impenetrable British barrier.
That would have been hardly true even of each side's surface ships; but it was as far as possible from the complete reality. For what had in fact begun with the outbreak of war—what had never ceased day or night—was a desperate and unceasing battle, none the less crucial because it was so often silent. Some hint of its real nature might have been gathered from the laconic Admiralty announcement, a day or two after war had been declared, that the German passenger steamer, Königin Luise, had been sunk, while mine-laying, by one of our destroyer patrols; and this vessel had been at work, fortunately with very little result, upon a subtle and long-prepared scheme of action. It is true that after she had been sunk, the cruiser Amphion—the leader of the Harwich Patrol that sank her—herself went down on one of the Königin Luise's mines; but the larger end aimed at remained unachieved.
This was no less than the mining in of Harwich, and was part of a deliberate and extensive plan, not only to cripple the northward progress of our larger squadrons to their war-stations, but to block the entrances of as many as possible of our chief naval bases. That some such policy would be attempted had, of course, long been foreseen. Germany's recalcitrant attitude at the Hague Conference toward the question of mine-laying had pointedly suggested this; and it was known that, prior to the outbreak of war, she had accumulated a store of at least ten thousand mines. To counter such measures steps had already been taken in the formation, a few years previously, of a trawler section of the Royal Naval Reserve, whose business it would be to keep the channels clear; while a group of old gun-boats had been assembled for the same purpose to act in conjunction with the Grand Fleet.