before! Good ships and good men on both sides,--and a
storm and the night and the dawn and all in the open ocean full steam
ahead! No stabbing! No submarines! Guns and shooting! Half our ships we
don't hear of any more, because their masts are shot away. Latitude,
30 degrees 40 minutes N.--longitude, 40 degrees 30 minutes W.--where's
that?"

He routed out his map again, and stared at it with eyes that did not
see.

"Der alte Barbarossa! I can't get it out of my head--with shells in her
engine-room, and the fires flying out of her furnaces, and the stokers
and engineers scalded and dead. Men I've messed with, Smallways--men
I've talked to close! And they've had their day at last! And it wasn't
all luck for them!

"Disabled and sinking! I suppose everybody can't have all the luck in a
battle. Poor old Schneider! I bet he gave 'em something back!"

So it was the news of the battle came filtering through to them all that
morning. The Americans had lost a second ship, name unknown; the Hermann
had been damaged in covering the Barbarossa.... Kurt fretted like an
imprisoned animal about the airship, now going up to the forward gallery
under the eagle, now down into the swinging gallery, now poring over his
maps. He infected Smallways with a sense of the immediacy of this battle
that was going on just over the curve of the earth. But when Bert went
down to the gallery the world was empty and still, a clear inky-blue
sky above and a rippled veil of still, thin sunlit cirrus below, through
which one saw a racing drift of rain-cloud, and never a glimpse of sea.
Throb, throb, throb, throb, went the engines, and the long, undulating
wedge of airships hurried after the flagship like a flight of swans
after their leader. Save for the quiver of the engines it was as
noiseless as a dream. And down there, somewhere in the wind and rain,
guns roared, shells crashed home, and, after the old manner of warfare,
men toiled and died.

4

As the afternoon wore on the lower weather abated, and the sea became
intermittently visible again. The air-fleet dropped slowly to the middle
air, and towards sunset they had a glimpse of the disabled Barbarossa
far away to the east. Smallways heard men hurrying along the passage,
and was drawn out to the gallery, where he found nearly a dozen officers
collected and scrutinising the helpless ruins of the battleship through
field-glasses. Two other vessels stood by her, one an exhausted petrol
tank, ve