In one casement, the only one, as they thought, undestroyed, two men continued to serve their guns. They fired it as the ship listed, adapting the elevation to the new situation. The Bluecher had run her course. She was lagging, lame, and with the steering gear gone was beginning slowly to circle. It was seen that she was doomed, but still the gunfire from the British kept up with relentless, incessant fury.
Some of the men on board were rendered deaf. The ship quivered and rocked under the recoil of her own guns. The deadly British broadsides made her reel. The guns were torn from their settings and whole gun crews hurled to destruction. Men hurtled down from aloft, bruised, bleeding, dead.
Men were swept from the deck like flies from a tablecloth. Everywhere blood trickled and flowed. It was a fever of excitement. Men found blood pouring down their legs, but could not locate their wounds. Men in authority lost their heads and confusion reigned. Their nerves could not stand the strain.
A shell would burst in the interior of the ship in a halo of flame and fire would arise from the deck, though there was nothing on the deck apparently that could burn. During the fight one of the sailors noticed the captain pull up his trousers and search for a wound; no one could then say whether he was wounded or not.
It has been generally believed that a ship fighting end-on stands the smallest chance of being hit. That is what our naval textbooks teach us. But that is no longer the case.
The effective target presented by an armored ship end-on is really much greater than when she is broadside-on, besides, in the former position, losing whatever protection might be afforded by her vertical side armor. This is one of the unexpected lessons taught by the ill-fated Bluecher.
We knew we had more than a hundred miles to go before we would reach the protection of our mine fields, and we knew that the Bluecher had the poorest chance of any of the German ships, as she was the slowest. Desperate efforts were made to keep the Bluecher at her maximum speed, but no matter how hard we tried to get away we saw the big English ships steadily overhauling us.
We knew what was in store for us as soon as our officers were able to make out the outlines of the approaching ships. We knew the armament and the gun equipment we had to face. We knew that each of those oncoming British battle cruisers could throw a weight of metal 10,000 pounds twice every minute—a total of fifty tons of projectiles every minute. Yet through it all some never despaired of their lives; others from the beginning gave themselves up as lost.
As the nearest of the English ships drew closer, the angle of their gun fire became flatter, but still from far off on the horizon came the shells it seemed to drop from the skies. After a time we were receiving literally a hailstorm of shells—some falling from overhead down through our decks, some penetrating through the stern and travelling half way the length of the ship, and still others coming straight through the sides.
And this was not all. The big British battle cruiser that led the British line thundered on past us and then began to rake us with her stern batteries. The gunners in the stern turrets of the British ship had been standing idle and restless, impatient to have a hand in the fight. As this ship drew on past us the rear guns for the first time had a chance at the Bluecher, and they tore our bow and forward works with their heavy shells, while the after guns of the secondary batteries raked our decks at point-blank range.