The British ships, as I have said, were away on the horizon, more than ten miles distant, when they started to fire. Shots came slowly at first. They fell ahead and over, raising vast columns of water; now they fell astern and short. The British guns were finding the range. Those deadly water spouts crept nearer and nearer. The men on deck watched them with a strange fascination.
Soon one pitched close to the ship, and a vast watery pillar, a hundred metres high, one of them affirmed, fell lashing on the deck. The range had been found. Dann aber ging's los! Now the shells came thick and fast, with a horrible droning hum. At once they did terrible execution. The electric plant was soon destroyed, and the ship plunged in a darkness that could be felt. "You could not see your hand before your nose," said one.
Down below decks there were horror and confusion, mingled with gasping shouts and moans as the shells plunged through the decks. It was only later, when the range shortened, that their trajectory flattened and they tore holes in the ship's sides and raked her decks. At first they came dropping from the sky.
This was because the British ships were firing from a great distance and must aim high in the air in order that their shells should reach us ten miles away. Thus it was that the shells falling from above on our decks found our most vulnerable spot—for our decks were not protected by steel armor as were our armor-belted sides.
The shells penetrated the decks. They bored their way even to the stokehold. The coal in the bunkers was set on fire. Since the bunkers were half empty the fire burned merrily.
In the engine room a shell licked up the oil and sprayed it around in flames of blue and green, scarring its victims and blazing where it fell. Men huddled together in dark compartments, but the shells sought them out, and there Death had a rich harvest. The terrific air pressure resulting from explosion in a confined space left a deep impression on the minds of all of us on the Bluecher. The air, it would seem, roars through every opening and tears its way through every weak spot. All loose or insecure fittings are transformed into moving instruments of destruction.
Open doors bang to—and jam—and closed iron doors bend outward like tin plates, and through it all the bodies of men are whirled about like dead leaves in a Winter blast, to be battered to death against the iron walls. In one of the engine rooms—it was the room where the high velocity engines for ventilation and forced draughts were at work—men were picked up by that terrible Luftdruck like the whirl drift at a street corner and tossed to a horrible death amid the machinery. There were other horrors too fearful to recount.
II—SCENES OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION
If it was appalling below deck it was more than appalling above. The Bluecher was under the fire of so many ships. Even the little destroyers peppered her. "It was one continuous explosion," said a gunner. The ship heeled over as the broadsides struck her, then righted herself, rocking like a cradle.
Gun crews were so destroyed that stokers had to be requisitioned to carry ammunition. Men lay flat for safety. The decks presented a tangled mass of scrap iron.