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 shells whooping up from the monitors at sea.  The surprise part of the attack was sprung.

[Sidenote:  The attack is a complete surprise.]

The surprise, despite the German’s watchfulness, seems to have been complete.  Up till the moment when the torpedoes of the motor-boats exploded, there had not been a shot from the land—­only occasional routine star-shells.  The motor-launches were doing their work magnificently.  These pocket-warships, manned by officers and men of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, are specialists at smoke-production; they built to either hand of the Vindictive’s course the likeness of a dense sea-mist driving landward with the wind.  The star-shells paled and were lost as they sank in it; the beams of the searchlights seemed to break off short upon its front.  It blinded the observers of the great batteries when suddenly, upon the warning of the explosions, the guns roared into action.

[Sidenote:  Heavy batteries on the Ostend coast open fire.]

There was a while of tremendous uproar.  The coast about Ostend is ponderously equipped with batteries, each with its name known and identified:  Tirpitz, Hindenburg, Deutschland, Cecilia, and the rest; they register from six inches up to monsters of fifteen-inch naval pieces in land-turrets, and the Royal Marine Artillery fights a war-long duel with them.  These now opened fire into the smoke and over it at the monitors; the Marines and the monitors replied; and, meanwhile, the aeroplanes were bombing methodically and the anti-craft guns were searching the skies for them, Star-shells spouted up and floated down, lighting the smoke banks with spreading green fires; and those strings of luminous green balls, which airmen call “flaming onions,” soared up up to lose themselves in the clouds.  Through all this stridency and blaze of conflict, the old Vindictive, still unhurrying, was walking the lighted waters towards the entrance.

It was then that those on the destroyers became aware that what had seemed to be merely smoke was wet and cold, that the rigging was beginning to drip, that there were no longer stars—­a sea-fog had come on.