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.
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