a dozen 7.5-in. shells charged with lyddite. But the Leicestershire was in serious plight. The damage done by the German torpedo was of the gravest nature. The British cruiser was heavily down by the stern; her port engine and propeller would no longer revolve; two compartments on the port quarter had filled, and water was leaking into the port engine-room. Very slowly, with the help of the starboard engine, Captain Cornwall took her in towards Leith and beached his ship on the shoals near the new harbour.
The opening act had been cleverly thought out by the German staff. While the torpedo boats were picking up the crew of the steamer, three divisions of German torpedo craft, each six boats strong, had passed into the Forth under the shadow of the northern coast. They glided like shadows through the darkness, and they do not seem to have been seen by the British vessels off Inchkeith, whose crews’ attention was riveted upon the Leicestershire. A fourth division, moving rapidly in the shadow of the southern coast, was seen by the Leicestershire and by the British launches about her and with her, and at once she opened fire upon the dim forms. But, bereft of motive power, she could not use her battery to advantage, and though it was thought that one of the destroyers disappeared in the water, the others sped up the estuary, towards the British fleet.
Warned by wireless telegraphy that destroyers had been sighted, the British crews were on the qui vive. There was not time at this eleventh hour to weigh and put out to sea; the only possible course was to meet the attack at anchorage. The fleet was anchored off Rosyth, the battleships in two lines ahead, headed by the flagships Vanguard and Captain. The Vanguard and Captain, the leading ships in the starboard and port lines respectively, were just abreast of the Beamer Rock and Port Edgar. The seven armoured cruisers were moored in the St. Margaret’s Hope Anchorage. To torpedo craft coming from the sea and passing under the Forth Bridge, the fleet thus offered a narrow front, and comparatively few of its guns would bear.
About 2.30 a.m. on Sunday morning, the lookout of the Vanguard detected white foam, as from the bows of a destroyer, just under Battery Point; a few seconds later, the same sign was seen to the south of Inchgarvie, and as the bugles sounded and the 12-in. guns in the three forward turrets of the British flagship opened, and the searchlights played their steady glare upon the dark waters just under the Forth Bridge, the forms of destroyers or torpedo boats fast approaching were unmistakably seen.
In a moment the air trembled with the concussion of heavy guns; the quick-firers of the fleet opened a terrific fire; and straight at the battleships came eighteen German destroyers and large torpedo boats, keeping perfect station, at impetuous speed. The sea boiled about them; the night seemed ablaze with the flashing of the great guns and the brilliant flame of exploding shells. Now one destroyer careened and disappeared; now another flew into splinters, as the gunners sent home their huge projectiles. Above all the din and tumult could be heard the rapid hammering of the pom-poms, as they beat from the bridges with their steady stream of projectiles upon the approaching craft.
Four destroyers went to the bottom in that furious onrush; ten entered the British lines, and passed down them with the great ships on either side, not more than 200 yards away, and every gun depressed as much as it could be, vomiting flame and steel upon the enemy; the others turned back. The thud of torpedo firing followed; but the boats amid that tempest of projectiles, with the blinding glare of the searchlights in their gunners’ eyes, aimed uncertainly. Clear and unforgettable the figures of officers and men stood out of the blackness, as the searchlights caught the boats. Some could be seen heaving heavy weights overboard; others were busy at the torpedo tubes; but in the blaze of light the pom-poms mowed them down, and tore the upper works of the destroyers to flinders. Funnels were cut off and vanished into space; a conning-tower was blown visibly away by a 12-in. shell which caught it fairly, and as the smitten boat sank there was a series of terrific explosions.
Fifth ship in the starboard British line from the Vanguard lay the great battleship Indefatigable, after the four “Dreadnoughts” one of the four powerful units in the fleet. Four torpedoes were fired at her by the German destroyers; three of the four missed her, two of them only by a hair’s breadth, but the fourth cut through the steel net and caught her fairly abreast of the port engine-room, about the level of the platform deck. The Germans were using their very powerful 17.7-in. Schwartzkopf torpedo, fitted with net-cutters, and carrying a charge of 265 lb. of gun-cotton, the heaviest employed in any navy, and nearly a hundred pounds heavier than that of the largest British torpedo.
The effect of the explosion was terrific. Though the Indefatigable had been specially constructed to resist torpedo attack, her bulkheads were not designed to withstand so great a mass of explosive, and the torpedo breached the plating of the wing compartments, the wing passage, and the coal-bunker, which lay immediately behind it. The whole structure of the ship was shaken and much injured in the neighbourhood of the explosion, and water began to pour through the shattered bulkheads into the port engine-room.
The pumps got to work, but could not keep the inrush down; the ship rapidly listed to the port side, and though “out collision mat” was ordered at once, and a mat got over the huge, gaping hole in the battleship’s side, the water continued to gain. Slipping her anchors, at the order of the Admiral, the Indefatigable proceeded a few hundred yards with her starboard screw to the shelving, sandy beach of Society Bank, where she dropped aground. Had the harbour works at Rosyth been complete, the value of them to the nation at this moment would have been inestimable, for there would have been plenty of time to get her into the dock which was under construction there. But in the desire to effect apparent economies the works since 1905 had been languidly pushed.
The calamities of the British fleet did not end with the torpedoing of the Indefatigable. A few seconds later some object drifting in the water, probably a mine – though in the confusion it was impossible to say what exactly happened – struck the Resistance just forward of the fore barbette. It must have drifted down inside the torpedo nets, between the hull and the network. There was an explosion of terrific violence, which rent a great breach in the side of the ship near the starboard fore torpedo tube, caused an irresistible inrush of water, and compelled her captain also to slip his anchors and beach his ship.
Two of the British battle squadron were out of action in the space of less than five minutes from the opening of fire.
Already the shattered remnants of the German torpedo flotilla were retiring; a single boat was steaming off as fast as she had come, but astern of her four wrecks lay in the midst of the British fleet devoid of motive power, mere helpless targets for the guns.
As they floated in the glare of the searchlights with the water sputtering about them, in the hail of projectiles, first one and then another, and finally all four, raised the white flag. Four German boats had surrendered; four more had been seen to sink in the midst of the fleet; one was limping slowly off under a rain of shells from the smaller guns of the Vanguard.
The British cruiser Londonderry was ordered to slip and give chase to her, and steamed off in pursuit down the Forth. A caution to “beware of mines” was flashed by the Admiral, and was needed. The German destroyers must have carried with them, and thrown overboard in their approach, a large number of these deadly agents, which were floating in all directions, greatly hampering the Londonderry in her chase.
But with the help of her searchlights she picked her way past some half-dozen mines which were seen on the surface, and she was so fortunate as not to strike any of those which had been anchored in the channel. Gathering speed, she overhauled the damaged destroyer. The crew could offer little resistance to the guns of a powerful cruiser.
A few shots from the three-pounders and a single shell from one of the Londonderry’s 7.5’s did the work. The German torpedo boat began to sink by the stern; her engines stopped; her rudder was driven by the explosion of the big projectile over to starboard, and the impulse of the speed at which she was travelling brought her head round towards the British vessel. The boat was almost flush with the water as one of her crew raised the white flag, and the fifth German boat surrendered.
The prisoners were rescued from the water with shaken nerves and quaking limbs, as men who had passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, who had endured the hail of shells and faced the danger of drowning.
So