CHAPTER VII.
INTO THE BIGHT AND END OF L 53.
I.
With lustful pride the Huns called the North Sea the German Ocean, and if there was any part of this dirty sheet of water which justified the name, it was that portion known as the Bight of Heligoland.
Here before the war were the growing harbours and shipyards with which she was challenging the British supremacy of the sea; and during the war her yards which turned out submarines, her seaplane and Zeppelin bases, and the refuges of her High Seas Fleet.
Climbing into a flying-boat and crossing a hundred miles of sea, brings you to the Hook of Holland. Turning north you pass Scheveningen, which is near The Hague, where peace conferences met to mitigate the horrors of war, or do away with it entirely, and supplied the Hun with a ready-made list of forbidden atrocities—atrocities which he immediately made haste to perpetrate.
Passing up the coast you come to the Dutch islands of Texel, Vlieland, Terschelling, and Ameland. Once around the corner of Terschelling Island, and you are in the Bight.
If you draw a line true north-east from this island it will touch Denmark just below the Horn Reefs, near the boundary-line between Schlesvig and Jutland, and all the water to the east of this line is the Bight, the particular property, more or less, during the war, of the Hun seaplanes, the Zeppelins, and the German Navy.