g with the flagship by wireless telegraphy,
but risking no exposure to the artillery below.

It is doubtful at what particular time the unlucky Americans realised
the presence of this new factor in the fight. No account now survives of
their experience. We have to imagine as well as we can what it must have
been to a battled-strained sailor suddenly glancing upward to discover
that huge long silent shape overhead, vaster than any battleship, and
trailing now from its hinder quarter a big German flag. Presently, as
the sky cleared, more of such ships appeared in the blue through the
dissolving clouds, and more, all disdainfully free of guns or armour,
all flying fast to keep pace with the running fight below.

From first to last no gun whatever was fired at the Vaterland, and only
a few rifle shots. It was a mere adverse stroke of chance that she had
a man killed aboard her. Nor did she take any direct share in the fight
until the end. She flew above the doomed American fleet while the Prince
by wireless telegraphy directed the movements of her consorts. Meanwhile
the Vogel-stern and Preussen, each with half a dozen drachenflieger in
tow, went full speed ahead and then dropped through the clouds, perhaps
five miles ahead of the Americans. The Theodore Roosevelt let fly at
once with the big guns in her forward barbette, but the shells burst far
below the Vogel-stern, and forthwith a dozen single-man drachenflieger
were swooping down to make their attack.

Bert, craning his neck through the cabin port-hole, saw the whole of
that incident, that first encounter of aeroplane and ironclad. He saw
the queer German drachenflieger, with their wide flat wings and square
box-shaped heads, their wheeled bodies, and their single-man riders,
soar down the air like a flight of birds. "Gaw!" he said. One to the
right pitched extravagantly, shot steeply up into the air, burst with a
loud report, and flamed down into the sea; another plunged nose forward
into the water and seemed to fly to pieces as it hit the waves. He
saw little men on the deck of the Theodore Roosevelt below, men
foreshortened in plan into mere heads and feet, running out preparing
to shoot at the others. Then the foremost flying-machine was rushing
between Bert and the American's deck, and then bang! came the thunder
of its bomb flung neatly at the forward barbette, and a thin little
crackling of rifle shots in reply. Whack, whack, whack, went the
quick-firing guns