His opposite number looked up languidly and solemnly winked his eye.
"'Tain't the fust of April, mate," he remarked in mild reproof. "D'ye want ter get me 'ung, or what not?"
Ten minutes later, the Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth was informed by wireless telephony from Culver Cliff of something that he was already well aware of—that five shells had been fired at the principal naval port of the British Empire. In addition, he learnt that the shells came from a submarine, nationality unknown, operating 16 miles S. 1/2 E. magnetic from Culver Cliff Signal Station.
In a very short time, the Admiral was in possession of material facts concerning the damage. One projectile had fallen in the Dockyard, completely demolishing the caisson at the entrance to No. 15 Dock, and severely damaging the light cruiser Volobus, which was undergoing repairs in that particular dock.
Another had hit the seaplane carrier Furious, which had recently returned from the Mediterranean. The shell had descended obliquely, just in the wake of the conning-tower. Fitted with a delayed-action fuse, the missile penetrated three decks before exploding in the port engine-room. The greatest effect of the explosive was downwards, indicating that it was composed of a substance allied to dynamite. The double-bottoms and "blister" on the port side were shattered to a length of fifty feet, pieces of the three-inch side-armour being torn bodily away. The Furious sank in eight minutes in seven fathoms.
Shell No. 3 descended on the railway close to Fratton Bridge, blowing a hole eighty feet in diameter in the railway cutting and bringing down the bridge. Here, the loss of life was great, for the bridge carried one of the principal arteries of the town. In addition, the sole means of railroad communication into and out of Portsmouth was cut. The most sanguine estimate placed the completion of the repairs at eight weeks. The remaining two projectiles luckily failed to do serious damage, one falling in the sea two hundred yards from the South Parade Pier, the other making a huge crater in the Fratton Park football ground twenty minutes after a huge crowd had departed.
The British nation had abandoned its old-established ideas of insular immunity. The lesson of the Great War, particularly the German "tip-and-run" raids on Scarborough, Whitby, Hartlepool, Lowestoft, Great Yarmouth, Dover, and elsewhere, had destroyed the fetish-like faith in the navy to render our shores inviolate. With a length of coast-line greater than that of any other country, taken in proportion to its area, Great Britain offers a decided chance of success to a daring sea-raider, and even when her fleet was at the zenith of power and size, the numbers were insufficient to protect the coast from minor hostile operations without seriously affecting the striking power of the Grand Fleet.
Thus the news of the bombardment of Portsmouth occasioned comparatively little surprise, except for the mystery of the affair. What was the nationality of the enemy craft? From what port did she come? Was she the emissary of a treacherous European Power, hoping to take advantage of the external and internal difficulties of the British Empire to deal a coward blow?
The idea of linking the submarine with the distant and insignificant Republic of Rioguay, with whom Britain was at war, seemed out of the question. Yet it was a submersible cruiser seventeen days out of San Antonio that had thrown out a challenge to the principal naval port of Great Britain.
Even as a professor of anatomy can reconstruct the skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth from a few scraps of bone, so can a gunnery expert decide upon the calibre and power of an unseen and unknown weapon from a few fragments of its projectile—and with a greater degree of certainty than in the case of the constructive anatomist.