blood-stained bandage round
his head, also stared.

"_Englaender!_" he said. "_Verdammte Schweine!_" and added, "_Fuenf!_
..." whereupon he and his companions also averted their heads, because
they were four.

They passed each other thus. The waves that washed over the raft
rolled the dead man's head to and fro, as if he found the situation
rather preposterous.

CHAPTER XI

THE AFTERMATH

Such was the Battle of the Mist, a triumphant assertion after nearly
two years of vigil and waiting, of British Sea Power. It commenced
with a cloud of smoke on the horizon no larger than a man's hand. Its
consequences and effects spread out in widening ripples through space
and time, changing the vast policies of nations, engulfing thousands of
humble lives and hopes and destinies. Centuries hence the ripples will
still be washing up the flotsam of that fight on the shores of human
life. Long after the last survivor has passed to dust the echo of the
British and German guns will rumble in ears not yet conceived. Princes
will hear it in the chimes of their marriage bells; it will accompany
the scratching of diplomatists' pens and the creaking wheels of the
pioneer's ox-wagon. It will sound above the clatter of Baltic
ship-yards and in the silence of the desert where the caravan routes
stretch white beneath the moon. The Afghan, bending knife in hand over
a whetstone, and the Chinese coolie knee-deep in his wet paddy-fields,
will pause in their work to listen to the sound, uncomprehending, even
while the dust is gathering on the labours of the historian and the
novelist....

But this tale does not aspire to deal with the wide issues or
significances of the war. It is an endeavour to trace the threads of
certain lives a little way through a loosely-woven fabric of great
events. At the conclusion there will be ends unfinished; the colours
of some will have changed to grey and others will have vanished into
the warp; but the design is so vast and the loom so near that we, in
our day and generation, can hope to glimpse but a very little of the
whole.

* * * * *

The India-rubber Man sat on the edge of the Wardroom table with his cap
tilted on the back of his head, eating bread and cold bacon. The mess
was illuminated by three or four candles stuck in empty saucers and
placed along the table amid the debris of a meal. The dim light shone
on the forms of a dozen or so of officers; some