It was Scarlett who fired the torpedo—"must let the old blighter have his chance!" my brother said—and it went straight and true to the Princessin Amalia, as we afterwards learned she was.
I think that was the worst of all. We torpedoed her from six hundred yards. There was no explosion, as there was in the case of the battleship. We could see everything far more distinctly. She simply broke in two and sank in three minutes, defenceless, impotent.
"Poor chaps!" I said, as we watched.
"Fortune of war!" Bernard answered—"Yes, poor chaps! At the same time, remember that they're the same sort of fellows who have been crucifying flappers in Belgium and taking out the whole male population of harmless villages and shooting them before breakfast. They would have been doing that all over Norfolk in thirty hours, if"—he paused—"if you hadn't been rejected by the R.N.F.C. and also been the right hand of the late lamented Doctor Upjelly. We must get down quickly, or else ..."
He had turned and was holding his binoculars to his eyes.
"Good heavens!" he said, "what's that?"
I turned, and I saw that the five destroyers were sweeping away in a great curve to the north. They were pursuing us no longer.
"What is it?" I cried.
The answer didn't come from my brother, though I heard it plainly enough. It was like thunder many miles away—a huge, dull boom such as I had never heard before.
"Why, they're running!"