of the Americans' battery, and smash came an answering
shell from the Furst Bismarck. Then a second and third flying-machine
passed between Bert and the American ironclad, dropping bombs also, and
a fourth, its rider hit by a bullet, reeled down and dashed itself to
pieces and exploded between the shot-torn funnels, blowing them apart.
Bert had a momentary glimpse of a little black creature jumping from the
crumpling frame of the flying-machine, hitting the funnel, and falling
limply, to be instantly caught and driven to nothingness by the blaze
and rush of the explosion.

Smash! came a vast explosion in the forward part of the flagship, and a
huge piece of metalwork seemed to lift out of her and dump itself
into the sea, dropping men and leaving a gap into which a prompt
drachenflieger planted a flaring bomb. And then for an instant Bert
perceived only too clearly in the growing, pitiless light a number of
minute, convulsively active animalcula scorched and struggling in the
Theodore Roosevelt's foaming wake. What were they? Not men--surely not
men? Those drowning, mangled little creatures tore with their clutching
fingers at Bert's soul. "Oh, Gord!" he cried, "Oh, Gord!" almost
whimpering. He looked again and they had gone, and the black stem of the
Andrew Jackson, a little disfigured by the sinking Bremen's last
shot, was parting the water that had swallowed them into two neatly
symmetrical waves. For some moments sheer blank horror blinded Bert to
the destruction below.

Then, with an immense rushing sound, bearing as it were a straggling
volley of crashing minor explosions on its back, the Susquehanna, three
miles and more now to the east, blew up and vanished abruptly in a
boiling, steaming welter. For a moment nothing was to be seen but
tumbled water, and--then there came belching up from below, with immense
gulping noises, eructations of steam and air and petrol and fragments of
canvas and woodwork and men.

That made a distinct pause in the fight. It seemed a long pause to Bert.
He found himself looking for the drachenflieger. The flattened ruin of
one was floating abeam of the Monitor, the rest had passed, dropping
bombs down the American column; several were in the water and apparently
uninjured, and three or four were still in the air and coming round
now in a wide circle to return to their mother airships. The American
ironclads were no longer in column formation; the Theodore Roosevelt,
badly damaged, h