What saved him was possibly the fact that the defunct Intrepid was still emitting huge clouds of smoke, which it had been worth nobody's while to turn off. He managed to catch a rope as the motor launch started, and was towed for a while till he was observed and taken on board. Another officer jumped ashore and ran along the bank to the launch. A bullet from the machine-gun stung him as he ran, and when he arrived, charging down the bank out of the dark, he was received by a number of the launch's crew who attacked him with a hammer.
Shells make incessant geysers in the harbor.
The whole harbor was alive with small craft. As the motor launch cleared the canal, and came forth to the incessant geysers thrown up by the shells, rescuers and rescued had a view of yet another phase of the attack. The shore end of the Mole consists of a jetty, and here an old submarine, commanded by Lieutenant R.D. Sandford, R.N., loaded with explosives, was run into the piles and touched off, her crew getting away in a boat to where the usual launch awaited them.
An old submarine is blown up.
Officers describe the explosion as the greatest they ever witnessed—a huge roaring spout of flame that tore the jetty in half and left a gap of over 100 feet. The claim of another launch to have sunk a torpedo-boat alongside the jetty is supported by many observers, including officers of the Vindictive, who had seen her mast and funnel across the Mole and noticed them disappear.
The splendid heroism of men and officers.
Where every moment had its deed and every deed its hero, a recital of acts of valor becomes a mere catalogue. "The men were magnificent," say the officers; the men's opinion of their leaders expresses itself in the manner in which they followed them, in their cheers, in their demeanor to-day while they tidy up their battered ships, setting aside the inevitable souvenirs, from the bullet-torn engines to great chunks of Zeebrugge Mole dragged down and still hanging in the fenders of the Vindictive. The motor launch from the canal cleared the end of the Mole and there beheld, trim and ready, the shape of the Warwick, with the great silk flag presented to the Admiral by the officers of his old ship, the Centurion. They stood up on the crowded decks of the little craft and cheered it again and again.
The Warwick takes off the men from the canal.
While the Warwick took them on board, they saw Vindictive, towed loose from the Mole by Daffodil, turn and make for home—a great black shape, with funnels gapped and leaning out of the true, flying a vast streamer of flame as her stokers worked her up—her, the almost wreck—to a final display of seventeen knots. Her forward funnel was a sieve; her decks were a dazzle of sparks; but she brought back intact the horseshoe nailed to it, which Sir Roger Keyes had presented to her commander.
One destroyer, the North Star, is sunk.