shells going right through it, but leaving it standing. Within fifty
minutes 1,500 German shells were fired into the town and harbor. While
two of the three cruisers which were engaged in bombarding drew off
further to sea and fired at Hartlepool, the third remained to finish the
battery on shore, but in spite of the fact that it was subjected to long
and heavy firing, it was not so terribly damaged. Many of the shells
from the other two ships went over the towns entirely and buried
themselves in the countryside that heretofore had been turned up only by
the peaceful plow. Other shells did havoc in the business and
residential sections of Hartlepool and West Hartlepool, bringing down
buildings and killing civilians in them as well as on the streets.

At about the same hour the coast guards near Scarborough reported the
approach of foreign ships off the coast, and then telephoned that the
strangers were German cruisers and that they had begun to bombard the
town. A German shell destroyed the shed from which the telephone message
had come and the warnings from it ceased. It was seen by those on shore
that the attack here was being made by four ships, two of them cruisers
and two of them mine layers, only 800 yards out in the water. This time
they were not handicapped by the fact that they had to stand out so far
from shore, and it was a surprise to the natives to see ships of such
draft come so close to land--a fact which convinced the British
authorities that spies had been at work since the first raid, sending to
the German admiralty either charts or detailed descriptions of the
region.

The castle was badly damaged by their fire; the town itself came next,
the Grand Hotel coming in for its share of destruction. They did little
injury to a wireless station in the suburbs, but hit quite a number of
residences, the gas and water works.

Half an hour afterward the two cruisers which had fired upon Scarborough
appeared off Whitby and began to fire at the signal station there. In
the ten minutes that the bombardment of Whitby lasted some 200 shells
fell into the place. This time the fact that the German ships came close
to the shore worked against them, for there are high cliffs close to the
water at the spot and it was necessary for the German gunners to use a
high angle, which did not give them much chance to be accurate. The
German ships next turned seaward and made for their home ports.

The scenes enacted in the th