"Seeing our papers admit it, so may I—our fellows got quite a nasty 'tummy-ache'. The enemy gave every bit as good as he got there. We then re-formed, but a strong destroyer belonging to the submarines got chased, and Arethusa and Fearless went back to look after her, and we presently heard a hot action astern. So the captain, who was in command of the flotilla, turned us round and we went back to help, but they had driven the enemy off, and on our arrival told us to form up on the Arethusa.
"When we had partly formed and were very much bunched together, a fine target, suddenly out of the 'everywhere' arrived five shells not 150 yards away. We gazed at whence they came, and again five or six stabs of fire pierced the mist, and we made out a four-funnelled cruiser of the 'Breslau' class. These five stabs were her guns going off, of course. We waited fifteen seconds and the shots and the noise of the guns arrived pretty simultaneously fifty yards away. Her next salvo went over us, and I, personally, ducked as they whirred overhead like a covey of fast partridges. You would have supposed the captain had done this sort of thing all his life; he gives me the impression of a Nelson officer who has lived in a state of suspended animation since, but yet has kept pace with the times, and is nowise perturbed at finding his frigate a destroyer. He went full speed ahead at the first salvo to string the bunch out and thus offer less target, and the commodore from the Arethusa made a signal to us to attack with torpedoes.
"So we swung round at right angles and charged full speed at the enemy, like a hussar attack. We got away at the start magnificently and led the field, so that all the enemy's fire was aimed at us for the next ten minutes. When we got so close that the debris of their shells fell on board, we altered our course and so threw them out in their reckoning of our speed, and they had all their work to do over again. You follow that with a destroyer coming at you at 30 knots it means that the range is decreasing at the rate of about 150 yards per ten seconds. When you see that your last shot fell, say, 100 yards short, you put up 100 extra yards on your sights; but this takes five seconds to do. When you have in this way discovered his speed you put that correction in automatically; a cruiser can do this, a destroyer has not room for the complicated apparatus involved. Humanly speaking, therefore, the captain, by twisting and turning at the psychological moment, saved us; actually I feel we are in God's keeping these days.
"After ten minutes we got near enough to fire our torpedo, and then turned back to the Arethusa. Next our follower arrived just where we had been and fired his torpedo, and of course the enemy fired at him, instead of at us. What a blessed relief! It was like coming out of a really hot and oppressive orchid house into the cool air of a summer garden. A 'hot' fire is properly descriptive; it seems actually to be hot! After the destroyers came the Fearless, and she stayed on the scene, and soon we found she was engaging a three-funneller, the Mainz. So off we started again to go for the Mainz, the situation being, I take it, that crippled Arethusa was too 'tummy'-aching to do anything but be defended by us, her children.
"Scarcely, however, had we started (I did not feel the least like another gruelling) when from out the mist and across our front in furious pursuit came the First Cruiser Squadron, the Town class, Birmingham, &c., each unit a match for three Mainz, and as we looked and reduced speed they opened fire, and the clear 'bang! bang!' of their guns was just a cooling drink! To see a real big four-funneller spouting flame, which flame denoted shells starting, and those shells not aimed at us but for us, was the most cheerful thing possible. Even as Kipling's infantryman, under heavy fire, cries 'The Guns, thank Gawd, the Guns', when his own artillery has come into action over his head, so did I feel as those 'Big Brothers' came careering across.
"Once we were in safety I hated it. We had just been having our own imaginations stimulated on the subject of shells striking us, and now, a few minutes later, to see another ship not three miles away reduced to a piteous mass of unrecognizability, wreathed in black fumes, from which flared out angry gouts of fire like Vesuvius in eruption, as an unending stream of 100-pound shells burst on board; it just pointed the moral and showed us what might have been! The Mainz was immensely gallant. The last I saw of her, absolutely wrecked alow and aloft, her whole midships a fuming inferno, she had one gun forward and one aft still spitting forth fury and defiance, 'like a wild cat mad with wounds'. Our own four-funnelled friend recommenced at this juncture with a couple of salvos, but rather half-heartedly; and we really did not care a ——, for there, straight ahead of us in lordly procession, like elephants walking through a pack of 'pi-dogs', came the Lion, Queen Mary, Invincible, and New Zealand, our battle-cruisers. Great and grim and uncouth as some antediluvian monsters, how solid they looked, how utterly earth-quaking.
"We pointed out our latest aggressor to them, whom they could not see from where they were, and they passed down the field of battle with the little destroyers on their left and the destroyed on their right, and we went west while they went east, and turned north between poor four-funnels and her home, and just a little later we heard the thunder of their guns for a space, then all silence, and we knew. Then wireless: 'Lion to all ships and destroyers; retire'. That was all.
"Remains only little details, only one of which I will tell you. The most romantic, dramatic, and piquant episode that modern war can ever show. The Defender, having sunk an enemy, lowered a whaler to pick up her swimming survivors; before the whaler got back an enemy's cruiser came up and chased the Defender, and thus she abandoned her whaler. Imagine their feelings; alone in an open boat without food, twenty-five miles from the nearest land, and that land the enemy's fortress, with nothing but fog and sea around them. Suddenly a swirl alongside, and up, if you please, pops His Britannic Majesty's submarine E 4, opens his conning-tower, takes them all on board, shuts up again, dives, and brings them home 250 miles! Is not that magnificent? No novel would dare face the critics with an episode like that in it, except, perhaps, Jules Verne—and all true!"