ehanna; she lay almost immediately
below, burning fore and aft, but still fighting two of her guns and
steaming slowly southward. The Bremen and the Weimar, both hit in
several places, were going west by south and away from her. The American
fleet, headed by the Theodore Roosevelt, was crossing behind them,
pounding them in succession, steaming in between them and the big modern
Furst Bismarck, which was coming up from the west. To Bert, however,
the names of all these ships were unknown, and for a considerable time
indeed, misled by the direction in which the combatants were moving, he
imagined the Germans to be Americans and the Americans Germans. He saw
what appeared to him to be a column of six battleships pursuing three
others who were supported by a newcomer, until the fact that the Bremen
and Weimar were firing into the Susquehanna upset his calculations.
Then for a time he was hopelessly at a loss. The noise of the guns, too,
confused him, they no longer seemed to boom; they went whack, whack,
whack, whack, and each faint flash made his heart jump in anticipation
of the instant impact. He saw these ironclads, too, not in profile,
as he was accustomed to see ironclads in pictures, but in plan and
curiously foreshortened. For the most part they presented empty decks,
but here and there little knots of men sheltered behind steel bulwarks.
The long, agitated noses of their big guns, jetting thin transparent
flashes and the broadside activity of the quick-firers, were the chief
facts in this bird's-eye view. The Americans being steam-turbine ships,
had from two to four blast funnels each; the Germans lay lower in the
water, having explosive engines, which now for some reason made an
unwonted muttering roar. Because of their steam propulsion, the American
ships were larger and with a more graceful outline. He saw all these
foreshortened ships rolling considerably and fighting their guns over
a sea of huge low waves and under the cold, explicit light of dawn. The
whole spectacle waved slowly with the long rhythmic rising and beat of
the airship.

At first only the Vaterland of all the flying fleet appeared upon the
scene below. She hovered high, over the Theodore Roosevelt, keeping
pace with the full speed of that ship. From that ship she must have
been intermittently visible through the drifting clouds. The rest of the
German fleet remained above the cloud canopy at a height of six or seven
thousand feet, communicatin