ry high out of the water, and the other a converted liner. Kurt
was at the end of the gallery, a little apart from the others.

"Gott!" he said at last, lowering his binocular, "it is like seeing
an old friend with his nose cut off--waiting to be finished. Der
Barbarossa!"

With a sudden impulse he handed his glass to Bert, who had peered
beneath his hands, ignored by every one, seeing the three ships merely
as three brown-black lines upon the sea.

Never had Bert seen the like of that magnified slightly hazy image
before. It was not simply a battered ironclad that wallowed helpless,
it was a mangled ironclad. It seemed wonderful she still floated. Her
powerful engines had been her ruin. In the long chase of the night
she had got out of line with her consorts, and nipped in between the
Susquehanna and the Kansas City. They discovered her proximity, dropped
back until she was nearly broadside on to the former battleship, and
signalled up the Theodore Roosevelt and the little Monitor. As dawn
broke she had found herself hostess of a circle. The fight had not
lasted five minutes before the appearance of the Hermann to the east,
and immediately after of the Furst Bismarck in the west, forced the
Americans to leave her, but in that time they had smashed her iron
to rags. They had vented the accumulated tensions of their hard day's
retreat upon her. As Bert saw her, she seemed a mere metal-worker's
fantasy of frozen metal writhings. He could not tell part from part of
her, except by its position.

"Gott!" murmured Kurt, taking the glasses Bert restored to him--"Gott!
Da waren Albrecht--der gute Albrecht und der alte Zimmermann--und von
Rosen!"

Long after the Barbarosa had been swallowed up in the twilight and
distance he remained on the gallery peering through his glasses, and
when he came back to his cabin he was unusually silent and thoughtful.

"This is a rough game, Smallways," he said at last--"this war is a rough
game. Somehow one sees it different after a thing like that. Many men
there were worked to make that Barbarossa, and there were men in it--one
does not meet the like of them every day. Albrecht--there was a man
named Albrecht--played the zither and improvised; I keep on wondering
what has happened to him. He and I--we were very close friends, after
the German fashion."

Smallways woke the next night to discover the cabin in darkness, a
draught blowing through it, and Kurt talking to himself in German.