of crumpled steel was
dropping to the bottom of the Channel.

While the attack on the destroyers was taking place, the cruisers were
only half a mile away. Their captains had found themselves in curiously
difficult positions. The destroyers were so close together, and the
movements of this strange monster which was running them down so
rapidly, that if they opened fire they were more likely to hit their own
vessels than it, but when the last had gone down, every available gun
spoke, and a hurricane of shells, large and small, ploughed up the sea
where the _Ithuriel had_ been. After the first volley, the captains
looked at their officers and the officers looked at the captains, and
said things which strained the capabilities of the French language to
the utmost. The monster had vanished.

The fact was that Erskine had foreseen that storm of shell, and the
pumps had been working hard while the ramming was going on. The result
was that the _Ithuriel_ sank almost as soon as her last victim, and in
thirty seconds there was nothing to shoot at.

"I shall ram those chaps from underneath," he said. "They've too many
guns for a shooting match."

He reduced the speed to thirty knots, rose for a moment till the
conning-tower was just above the water, took his bearings, sank, called
for full speed, and in four minutes the ram crashed into the _Alger's_
stern, carried away her sternpost and rudder, and smashed her
propellers. The _Ithuriel_ passed on as if she had hit a log of wood and
knocked it aside. A slight turn of the steering-wheel, and within four
minutes the ram was buried in the vitals of the _Suchet_. Then the
_Ithuriel_ reversed engines, the fore screw sucked the water away, and
the cruiser slid off the ram as she might have done off a rock. As she
went down, the _Ithuriel_ rose to the surface. The third cruiser, the
_Davout_, was half a mile away. She had changed her course and was
evidently making frantic efforts to get back to sea.

"Going to warn the fleet, are you, my friend?" said Erskine, between
his teeth. "Not if I know it!"

He asked for full speed again and the terror-stricken Frenchmen saw the
monster, just visible on the surface of the water, flying towards them
in the midst of a cloud of spray. A sheep might as well have tried to
escape from a tiger. Many of the crew flung themselves overboard in the
madness of despair. There was a shock and a grinding crash, and the ram
bored its way twenty feet in