"Some of their cruiser squadrons are nevertheless venturing nearer to our mine-fields than is good for them, sir. To-day, for example, we passed a squadron hardly a score of miles from the south-west of Heligoland."
"Ha!" cried the admiral, growing excited. "So near? Why did you not inform me at once, instead of wasting my time and our opportunity? Already we might have sent out a flotilla of our faithful submarines to torpedo them! A squadron, you say? Of what strength?"
Max produced the notes that he had taken.
"Thunder and lightning!" exclaimed his uncle, at sight of the precise details. And, gathering the charts and the notes, he got into his oilskins and hurried out of the cabin to hold a council of war with several of his fellow admirals and captains on board the cruiser Klopstock.
Max saw no more of him that night; but by the bustle and excitement and incessant noise that kept him from sleeping, he knew that the ship was being prepared for action.
Early in the morning he was awakened by the chunking of the engines and the noisy working of the ammunition hoists. He got up and dressed in his midshipman's uniform and went out to the upper deck. The rain had ceased, but there was a thick mist over the sea, through which he could only dimly make out the cliffs of Heligoland with their concrete battlements and bristling guns.
As the cruiser drew nearer, he could see the forts more clearly, with the naval harbour, from which a large flotilla of destroyers and submarines had just come out. Here the Schiller came to a stop beside other cruisers—the Klopstock with her four tall funnels, the Goethe, the Ariadne, the Coblentz, and the great Derfflinger, with her five pairs of 12-inch guns—while twenty destroyers, accompanied by six submarines, disappeared in the mist on their way out to sea.
On board the Schiller all was cleared for action, everything inflammable was left behind, and the decks were flooded in case of fire, the guns were loaded and the men at their stations all ready for fighting, waiting only for a wireless message to come back from the advance scouts to say that the enemy had been found.
Instead of a Marconi message, there came the distant booming of British 4-inch guns, mingling with the sound of the drums as the bands on the German cruisers played "Der Wacht am Rhein."
"Ha!" cried Admiral von Hilliger, rubbing his hands together as he paced his quarter-deck. "Now we have them!"