“They will get our whole day’s work,” growled K——.
“Hurray!” we all shouted the next minute, as a shell struck the barge full center, exploding the six mines and shattering it in bits, enveloping all in a dense cloud of black smoke.
At this moment the other launch came alongside and raced along with us. I threw my cameras into it, and jumped aboard; then we sheared off again, so as not to give the enemy too big a target.
Next minute three shells shrieked so close to our ears that we threw ourselves flat in the bottom of the launch and one shaved the deck of No. 10. There seemed to be no escape. The Italians cut us off from Trieste, and we headed for Miramar. They did not come nearer; but the Lord knows they were near enough, and by rights they should have sent us to the bottom the first three shots. Even had they steamed directly up to us, they could have got us by the scruff of the neck in five minutes, for we could make only ten knots to their twenty-five.
One fast torpedo-boat, risking what was a few hours ago their own mine field, and, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary, got the No. 10 and our launch in line and gave us all attention in the manner of a pot-hunter trying to rake us. I had just taken my moving picture camera out of its case and set it on the tripod when a shell struck three feet from the launch, raising a big geyser. The column of water descending douched us and stopped our motor. I had to dry off the spark plugs while the engineer got busy cranking.
Happily, the motor sprang right on again, and I got back to the camera and commenced cranking. I tried to keep the No. 10 and the San Marco in the view-finder in case they should get hit, and endeavored to get the spouting of the shells. I got about one hundred feet of it, but it is a tame illustration of all the excitement of a race between life and death. The Italians with their speed, having passed us, now swung around again and edged us off from Miramar, so we held to the west of it for our shore batteries.
All this time we kept wondering why the next shell didn’t strike one of us. Then we saw one of our submarines just diving to the periscope. By this time we came nearly within range of our shore batteries, and one of them began to bark at the Italians, but at such range and in the fog they must have just tried to scare them, for we couldn’t even see the shells hitting the water. However, we escaped “by the skin of our teeth.”
As the fog had lifted a little around noon, and we could see the houses on shore, evidently the lookouts had reported our presence and the Italians had left Grado to tackle us. The obscurity of the fog, the strange-looking barge, the San Marco, the proximity of the mine fields, all this had rendered the Italians so cautious that they were satisfied to run parallel with us and give us their broadside. The last we saw of them was when they swung more and more around toward their own coast and were again enveloped in the fog. They were the same four vessels that had bombarded us the day before, when I flew with Lieut. D—— in a hydroplane over Grado.