himper like a
distraught child. "It's my hand..." he said plaintively, and extended
a trembling, shattered palm. "I've only just noticed it."

With his eye glued to the periscope of his turret the India-rubber Man
was fidgeting and swearing softly under his breath at the exasperating
treachery of the fog. The great guns under his control roared at
intervals, but before the effect of the shell-burst could be observed
the enemy would be swallowed from sight. Once, at the commencement of
the action, he thought of Betty; he thought of her tenderly and
reverently, and then put her out of his mind....

Lanes of unexpected visibility opened while an eye-lid winked, and
disclosed a score of desperate fights passing and reappearing like
scenes upon a screen. A German Battleship, near and quite distinct,
was in sight for a moment, listing slowly over with her guns pointing
upwards like the fingers of a distraught hand, and as she sank the mist
closed down again as it were a merciful curtain drawn to hide a horror.
An enemy Cruiser dropped down the engaged side of the line like an
exhausted participator in a Bacchanal of Furies. Her sides were riven
and gaping, with a red glare showing through the rents. Her decks were
a ruined shambles of blackened, twisted metal, but she still spat
defiance from a solitary gun, and sank firing as the fight swept past.

Hither and thither rolled the fog, blotting out the enemy at one
moment, at another disclosing swift and awful cataclysms. A British
Cruiser, dodging and zigzagging through a tempest of shells, blew up.
She changed on the instant into a column of black smoke and wreckage
that leaped up into the outraged sky; it trembled there like a dark
monument to the futile hate of man for his brother man and slowly
dissolved into the mist. A German Destroyer attack crumpled up in the
blast of the 6-inch batteries of the British Fleet, and the British
Destroyers dashed to meet their crippled onslaught as vultures might
swoop on blinded wolves. They fought at point-blank range, asking no
quarter, expecting none; they fought over decks ravaged by shrapnel and
piled with dead. The sea was thick with floating corpses and shattered
wreckage, and darkened with patches of oil that marked the grave of a
rammed Submarine or sunken Destroyer. Maimed and bleeding men dragged
themselves on to rafts and cheered their comrades as they left them to
their death.

Through that witches' cauld