CONTENTS

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Illustrations

["'Can you spare us any torpedoes?' shouted Sefton"] . . . Frontispiece
["'We surrender make.... We haf a leak sprung'"]
["Without hesitation Sefton made a flying leap over the guard rails"]
["Poising himself for an instant, Sefton leapt on the 'Calder's' deck"]
["She sent a huge shell at point-blank range crashing into the light-built hull"]
["The 'Calder' had played her part, and it seemed base ingratitude to leave her to founder"]

WITH BEATTY OFF JUTLAND

[CHAPTER I--The Ward-room of H.M.S. "Calder"]

A cold grey morning in April somewhere in the North Sea; to be more exact, 18 miles N. 75° W. of the Haisborough Lightship.

Viewed from the fore-bridge of H.M. torpedo-boat destroyer Calder, there was little in the outlook to suggest that a state of war had existed for twenty months. The same short steep seas, the same lowering sky, the almost unbroken horizon towards which many anxious glances were hourly directed in the hope that "they" had at last come out.

Two cables' distance from the Calder, a typical trawler, with dense columns of smoke issuing from her funnel, was forging slowly ahead. Another vessel of a similar type was steaming in almost the opposite direction, and on a course that would bring her close under the stern of the almost motionless destroyer. From the galley funnel of each trawler a trail of bluish smoke was issuing, the reek as it drifted across the Calder's deck indicating pretty plainly the nature of the "hands'" breakfast. Of the crew of either craft no one was visible, the helmsman in each case sheltering in the ugly squat wheel-house on the bridge.