World's War Events Volume III Part 12

[Sidenote: The enemy fights with the machine-guns.]

A bombing party, working up towards the Mole extension in search of the enemy, destroyed several machine-gun emplacements, but not a single prisoner rewarded them. It appears that upon the approach of the ships, and with the opening of the fire, the enemy simply retired and contented themselves with bringing machine-guns to the sh.o.r.e end of the Mole. And while they worked and destroyed, the covering party below the parapet could see in the harbor, by the light of the German star sh.e.l.ls, the shapes of the block ships stealing in and out of their own smoke and making for the mouth of the ca.n.a.l.

[Sidenote: The _Thetis_ shows the road to all the ships.]

_Thetis_ came first, steaming into a tornado of sh.e.l.l from the great batteries ash.o.r.e. All her crew, save a remnant who remained to steam her in and sink her, had already been taken off by the ubiquitous motor launches, but the remnant spared hands enough to keep her four guns going. It was hers to show the road to _Intrepid_ and _Iphigenia_, who followed.

[Sidenote: The _Thetis_ is sunk.]

She cleared the string of armed barges which defends the channel from the tip of the Mole, but had the ill-fortune to foul one of her propellers upon the net defence which flanks it on the sh.o.r.e side. The propeller gathered in the net and rendered her practically unmanageable; the sh.o.r.e batteries found her and pounded her unremittingly; she b.u.mped into a bank, edged off, and found herself in the channel again, still some hundreds of yards from the mouth of the ca.n.a.l, in a practically sinking condition. As she lay she signalled invaluable directions to the others, and here Commander R.S. Sneyd, D.S.O., accordingly blew the charges and sank her. A motor launch, under Lieutenant H. Littleton, R.N.V.R., raced alongside and took off her crew. Her losses were five killed and five wounded.

[Sidenote: The _Intrepid_ follows.]

_Intrepid_, smoking like a volcano and with all her guns blazing, followed; her motor launch had failed to get alongside outside the harbor, and she had men enough for anything. Straight into the ca.n.a.l she steered, her smoke blowing back from her into _Iphigenia's_ eyes, so that the latter, blinded and going a little wild, rammed a dredger with a barge moored beside it, which lay at the western arm of the ca.n.a.l.

She got clear though, and entered the ca.n.a.l pushing the barge before her. It was then that a sh.e.l.l hit the steam connections of her whistle, and the escape of steam which followed drove off some of the smoke and let her see what she was doing.

[Sidenote: Sinking of the _Intrepid_ and the _Iphigenia_.]

Lieutenant Stuart Bonham-Carter, commanding the _Intrepid_, placed the nose of his ship neatly on the mud of the western bank, ordered his crew away, and blew up his ship by the switches in the chart-room. Four dull b.u.mps was all that could be heard; and immediately afterwards there arrived on deck the engineer, who had been in the engine-room during the explosion and reported that all was as it should be.

[Sidenote: Probable that the ca.n.a.l is effectively blocked.]

Lieutenant E.W. Billyard-Leake, commanding _Iphigenia_, beached her according to arrangement on the eastern side, blew her up, saw her drop nicely across the ca.n.a.l, and left her with her engines still going to hold her in position till she should have bedded well down on the bottom. According to latest reports from air observation, the two old ships with their holds full of concrete are lying across the ca.n.a.l in a V position; and it is probable that the work they set out to do has been accomplished and that the ca.n.a.l is effectively blocked.

A motor launch, under Lieutenant P.T. Deane, R.N.V.R., had followed them in to bring away the crews, and waited further up the ca.n.a.l towards the mouth against the western bank. Lieutenant Bonham-Carter, having sent away his boats, was reduced to a Carley float, an apparatus like an exaggerated lifebuoy with a floor of grating. Upon contact with the water it ignited a calcium flare, and he was adrift in the uncanny illumination with a German machine-gun a few hundred yards away giving him its undivided attention.

What saved him was possibly the fact that the defunct _Intrepid_ was still emitting huge clouds of smoke, which it had been worth n.o.body'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 ash.o.r.e 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.

[Sidenote: Sh.e.l.ls make incessant geysers in the harbor.]

The whole harbor was alive with small craft. As the motor launch cleared the ca.n.a.l, and came forth to the incessant geysers thrown up by the sh.e.l.ls, rescuers and rescued had a view of yet another phase of the attack. The sh.o.r.e 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 ca.n.a.l 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.

[Sidenote: The _Warwick_ takes off the men from the ca.n.a.l.]

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.

[Sidenote: One destroyer, the _North Star_, is sunk.]

[Sidenote: Monitors and siege guns bombard the enemy.]

Meantime the destroyers _North Star_, _Phoebe_, and _Warwick_, which guarded the _Vindictive_ from action by enemy destroyers while she lay beside the Mole, had their share in the battle. _North Star_, losing her way in the smoke, emerged to the light of the star-sh.e.l.ls, and was sunk.

The German _communique_, which states that only a few members of the crew could be saved by them, is in this detail of an unusual accuracy, for the _Phoebe_ came up under a heavy fire in time to rescue nearly all. Throughout the operations monitors and the siege guns in Flanders, manned by the Royal Marine Artillery, heavily bombarded the enemy's batteries.

[Sidenote: The attack on Ostend.]

The wind that blew back the smoke-screen at Zeebrugge served us even worse off Ostend, where that and nothing else prevented the success of an operation ably directed by Commodore Hubert Lynes, C.M.G. The coastal motor boats had lit the approaches and the ends of the piers with calcium flares and made a smoke-cloud which effectually hid the fact from the enemy. _Sirius_ and _Brilliant_ were already past the Stroom Bank buoy when the wind changed, revealing the arrangements to the enemy, who extinguished the flares with gunfire.

[Sidenote: The _Sirius_ runs aground.]

The _Sirius_ was already in a sinking condition when at length the two ships, having failed to find the entrance, grounded, and were forced therefore to sink themselves at a point about four hundred yards east of the piers, and their crews were taken off by motor launches.

[Sidenote: Operations cannot be rehea.r.s.ed.]

The difficulty of the operation is to be gauged from the fact that from Zeebrugge to Ostend the enemy batteries number not less than 120 heavy guns, which can concentrate on retiring ships, during daylight, up to a distance of about sixteen miles. This imposes as a condition of success that the operation must be carried out at night, and not late in the night. It must take place at high water, with the wind from the right quarter, and with a calm sea for the small craft. The operation cannot be rehea.r.s.ed beforehand, since the essence of it is secrecy, and though one might have to wait a long time to realize all the essential conditions of wind and weather, secrecy wears badly when large numbers of men are brought together in readiness for the attack.

[Sidenote: The _Vindictive_ makes for Ostend.]

The _Sirius_ lies in the surf some two thousand yards east of the entrance to Ostend Harbor, which she failed so gallantly to block; and when, in the early hours of yesterday morning, the _Vindictive_ groped her way through the smoke-screen and headed for the entrance, it was as though the old fighting-ship awoke and looked on. A coastal motor-boat had visited her and hung a flare in her slack and rusty rigging; and that eye of unsteady fire, paling in the blaze of the star-sh.e.l.ls or reddening through the drift of the smoke, watched the whole great enterprise, from the moment when it hung in doubt to its ultimate triumphant success.

[Sidenote: Unforeseen conditions add to the difficulties.]

[Sidenote: German destroyers guard the coast.]

The planning and execution of that success had been entrusted by the Vice-Admiral, Sir Roger Keyes, to Commodore Hubert Lynes, C.M.G., who directed the previous attempt to block the harbor with _Sirius_ and _Brilliant_. Upon that occasion, a combination of unforeseen, and unforeseeable, conditions had fought against him; upon this, the main problem was to secure the effect of a surprise attack upon an enemy who was clearly, from his ascertained dispositions, expecting him. _Sirius_ and _Brilliant_ had been baffled by the displacement of the Stroom Bank buoy, which marks the channel to the harbor entrance, but since then aerial reconnaissance had established that the Germans had removed the buoy altogether and that there were now no guiding marks of any kind.

They had also cut gaps in the piers as a precaution against a landing; and, further, when towards midnight on Thursday the ships moved from their anchorage, it was known that some nine German destroyers were out and at large upon the coast. The solution of the problem is best indicated by the chronicle of the event.

[Sidenote: A still sea and no moon.]

It was a night that promised well for the enterprise--nearly windless, and what little breeze stirred came from a point or so west of north; a sky of lead-blue, faintly star-dotted, and no moon; a still sea for the small craft, the motor-launches and the coastal motor-boats, whose work is done close in sh.o.r.e. From the destroyer which served the Commodore for flagship, the remainder of the force was visible only as swift silhouettes of blackness, destroyers bulking like cruisers in the darkness, motor-launches like destroyers, and coastal motor-boats showing themselves as racing hillocks of foam. From Dunkirk, a sudden and brief flurry of gunfire announced that German aeroplanes were about--they were actually on their way to visit Calais; and over the invisible coast of Flanders the summer-lightning of the restless artillery rose and fell monotonously.

[Sidenote: _Vindictive_ pa.s.ses.]

"There's _Vindictive_!" The m.u.f.fled seamen and marines standing by the torpedo-tubes and the guns turned at that name to gaze at the great black ship, seen mistily through the streaming smoke from the destroyer's funnels, plodding silently to her goal and her end.

Photographs have made familiar that high-sided profile and the tall funnels, with their Zeebrugge scars, always with a background of the pier at Dover against which she lay to be fitted for her last task; now there was added to her the environment of the night and the sea and the greatness and tragedy of her mission.

[Sidenote: Small craft guide the _Vindictive_.]

She receded into the night astern as the destroyer raced on to lay the light buoy that was to be her guide, and those on board saw her no more.

She pa.s.sed thence into the hands of the small craft, whose mission it was to guide her, light her, and hide her in the clouds of the smoke-screen.

[Sidenote: Precise orders are planned for each stage of operation.]

There was no preliminary bombardment of the harbor and the batteries as before the previous attempt; that was to be the first element in the surprise. A time-table had been laid down for every stage of the operation; and the staff work beforehand had even included precise orders for the laying of the smoke barrage, with plans calculated for every direction of wind. The monitors, anch.o.r.ed in their firing-positions far to seaward, awaited their signal; the great siege batteries of the Royal Marine Artillery in Flanders--among the largest guns that have ever been placed on land-mountings--stood by likewise to neutralize the big German artillery along the coast; and the airmen who were to collaborate with an aerial bombardment of the town waited somewhere in the darkness overhead. The destroyers patrolled to seaward of the small craft.

[Sidenote: The signal is given for the guns to open.]

The _Vindictive_, always at that solemn gait of hers, found the flagship's light-buoy and bore up for where a coastal motor-boat, commanded by Lieutenant William R. Slayter, R.N., was waiting by a calcium flare upon the old position of the Stroom Bank buoy. Four minutes before she arrived there, and fifteen minutes only before she was due at the harbor mouth, the signal for the guns to open was given.

Two motor-boats dashed in towards the ends of the high wooden piers and torpedoed them. There was a machine-gun on the end of the western pier, and that vanished in the roar and the leap of flame and debris which called to the guns. Over the town a flame suddenly appeared high in air, and sank slowly earthwards--the signal that the aeroplanes had seen and understood; and almost coincident with their first bombs came the first sh.e.l.ls whooping up from the monitors at sea. The surprise part of the attack was sprung.

[Sidenote: The attack is a complete surprise.]