There was a moment immediately afterwards when it seemed to those in the ships as if the dim coast and the hidden harbor exploded into light.  A star shell soared aloft, then a score of star shells; the wavering beams of the searchlights swung round and settled to a glare; the wildfire of gun flashes leaped against the sky; strings of luminous green beads shot aloft, hung and sank; and the darkness of the night was supplanted by the nightmare daylight of battle fires.  Guns and machine-guns along the Mole and batteries ashore woke to life, and it was in a gale of shelling that Vindictive laid her nose against the thirty-foot high concrete side of the Mole, let go an anchor, and signed to Daffodil to shove her stern in. Iris went ahead and endeavored to get alongside likewise.

[Sidenote:  Captain Carpenter in the flame-thrower hut.]

The fire, from the account of everybody concerned, was intense.  While ships plunged and rolled beside the Mole in an unexpected send of sea, Vindictive with her greater draught jarring against the foundation of the Mole with every plunge, they were swept diagonally by machine-gun fire from both ends of the Mole and by heavy batteries ashore.  Commander A.F.B.  Carpenter (now Captain) conned Vindictive from her open bridge till her stern was laid in, when he took up his position in the flame-thrower hut on the port side.  It is to this hut that reference has already been made; it is marvellous that any occupant of it should have survived a minute, so riddled and shattered is it.  Officers of Iris, which was in trouble ahead of Vindictive, describe Captain Carpenter as “handling her like a picket-boat.”

[Sidenote:  The Vindictive’s false high deck and gangways.]

Vindictive was fitted along the port side with a high false deck, whence ran the eighteen brows, or gangways, by which the storming and demolition parties were to land.  The men were gathered in readiness on the main and lower decks, while Colonel Elliot, who was to lead the Marines, waited on the false deck just abaft the bridge, and Captain H.C.  Halahan, who commanded the bluejackets, was amidships.  The gangways were lowered, and scraped and rebounded upon the high parapet of the Mole as Vindictive rolled; and the word for the assault had not yet been given when both leaders were killed, Colonel Elliot by a shell and Captain Halahan by the machine-gun fire which swept the decks.  The same shell that killed Colonel Elliot also did fearful execution in the forward Stokes Mortar Battery.

[Sidenote:  Landing on the Mole.]

“The men were magnificent.”  Every officer bears the same testimony.  The mere landing on the Mole was a perilous business; it involved a passage across the crashing, splintering gangways, a drop over the parapet into the field of fire of the German machine-guns which swept its length, and a further drop of some sixteen feet to the surface of the Mole itself.  Many were killed and more were wounded as they crowded up to the gangways; but nothing hindered the orderly and speedy landing by every gangway.