Eblis, Gehenna’s next astern, at once fired
a torpedo at the second ship in the German line, a
four-funnelled cruiser, and hit her between the second
funnel and the mainmast, when “she appeared to
catch fire fore and aft simultaneously, heeled right
over to starboard, and undoubtedly sank.”
Eblis loosed off a second torpedo and turned aside
to reload, firing at the same time to distract the
enemy’s attention from Gehenna, who was now
ablaze fore and aft. Gehenna’s acting sub-lieutenant
(the only executive officer who survived) says that
by the time the steam from the broken pipe cleared
he found Gehenna stopped, nearly everybody amidships
killed or wounded, the cartridge-boxes round the guns
exploding one after the other as the fires took hold,
and the enemy not to be seen. Three minutes or
less did all that damage. Eblis had nearly finished
reloading when a shot struck the davit that was swinging
her last torpedo into the tube and wounded all hands
concerned. Thereupon she dropped torpedo work,
fired at an enemy searchlight which winked and went
out, and was closing in to help Gehenna when she found
herself under the noses of a couple of enemy cruisers.
“The nearer one,” he says, “altered
course to ram me apparently.” The Senior
Service writes in curiously lawyer-like fashion, but
there is no denying that they act quite directly.
“I therefore put my helm hard aport and the
two ships met and rammed each other, port bow to port
bow.” There could have been no time to think
and, for Eblis’s commander on the bridge, none
to gather information. But he had observant subordinates,
and he writes—and I would humbly suggest
that the words be made the ship’s motto for evermore—he
writes, “Those aft noted” that the enemy
cruiser had certain marks on her funnel and certain
arrangements of derricks on each side which, quite
apart from the evidence she left behind her, betrayed
her class. Eblis and she met. Says Eblis:
“I consider I must have considerably damaged
this cruiser, as 20 feet of her side plating was left
in my foc’sle.” Twenty feet of ragged
rivet-slinging steel, razoring and reaping about in
the dark on a foc’sle that had collapsed like
a concertina! It was very fair plating too.
There were side-scuttle holes in it—what
we passengers would call portholes. But it might
have been better, for Eblis reports sorrowfully, “by
the thickness of the coats of paint (duly given in
32nds of the inch) she would not appear to have been
a very new ship.”
New or old, the enemy had done her best. She
had completely demolished Eblis’s bridge and
searchlight platform, brought down the mast and the
fore-funnel, ruined the whaler and the dinghy, split
the foc’sle open above water from the stem to
the galley which is abaft the bridge, and below water
had opened it up from the stem to the second bulkhead.
She had further ripped off Eblis’s skin-plating
for an amazing number of yards on one side of her,
