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.”

A FUGITIVE ON FIRE

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,