They stood up on the crowded decks of the little
craft and cheered it again and again.
[Sidenote: The _Warwick_ takes off the men from the canal.]
While the _Warwick_ took them on board, they saw _Vindictive_, towed
loose from the Mole by _Daffodil_, turn and make for home--a great black
shape, with funnels gapped and leaning out of the true, flying a vast
streamer of flame as her stokers worked her up--her, the almost
wreck--to a final display of seventeen knots. Her forward funnel was a
sieve; her decks were a dazzle of sparks; but she brought back intact
the horseshoe nailed to it, which Sir Roger Keyes had presented to her
commander.
[Sidenote: One destroyer, the _North Star_, is sunk.]
[Sidenote: Monitors and siege guns bombard the enemy.]
Meantime the destroyers _North Star_, _Phoebe_, and _Warwick_, which
guarded the _Vindictive_ from action by enemy destroyers while she lay
beside the Mole, had their share in the battle. _North Star_, losing her
way in the smoke, emerged to the light of the star-shells, and was sunk.
The German _communique_, which states that only a few members of the
crew could be saved by them, is in this detail of an unusual accuracy,
for the _Phoebe_ came up under a heavy fire in time to rescue nearly
all. Throughout the operations monitors and the siege guns in Flanders,
manned by the Royal Marine Artillery, heavily bombarded the enemy's
batteries.
[Sidenote: The attack on Ostend.]
The wind that blew back the smoke-screen at Zeebrugge served us even
worse off Ostend, where that and nothing else prevented the success of
an operation ably directed by Commodore Hubert Lynes, C.
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