held on her course. At five hundred yards her guns spoke, and the
splinters began to fly on board the _Britain_. The Captain of the
_Verite_ signalled for the last ounce of steam he could have--he was
going to appeal to the last resort in naval warfare--the ram. If he
could once get that steel spur of his into the _Britain's_ hull under
her armour, she would go down as certainly as though she had been a
first-class cruiser.

When the approaching vessels were a little more than five hundred yards
apart, the _Ithuriel_, who had settled up with all the destroyers and
torpedo boats she could find, rose to the north of the now broken French
line. Erskine took in the situation at a glance. He snatched the
receiver from the hooks, shouted into it:

"Sink--full speed--ram!"

The _Ithuriel_ dived and sprang forward, and when the ram of the
_Verite_ was within a hundred yards of the side of the _Britain_ his own
ram smashed through her stern, cracked both the propeller shafts, and
tore away her rudder as if it had been a piece of paper. She stopped
and yawed, broadside on to the _Britain_. The chases of the great guns
swung round in ominous threatening silence, but before they could be
fired the Tricolor fluttered down from the flagstaff, and the _Verite_,
helpless for all fighting purposes, had surrendered.

It was now the turn of the big armoured cruisers. They were practically
untouched, for the heaviest of the fighting had fallen on the
battleships. A green rocket went up from the deck of the _Britain_, and
was followed in about ten seconds by a blue one. The inner line of
cruisers made a quarter turn to port, and began hammering into the
crippled battleships and cruisers indiscriminately, while the
_Leviathan_, _Good Hope_, _Powerful_ and _Terrible_ took stations
between the Isle of Wight and the Sussex coast.

The _Ithuriel_ rose to her three-foot freeboard, and put in some very
pretty practice with her pneumatic guns on the topworks of the cruisers.
The six-funnelled _Jeanne d'Arc_ got tired of this, and made a rush at
her at her full speed of twenty-three knots, with the result that the
_Ithuriel_ disappeared, and three minutes afterwards there came a shock
under the great cruiser's stern which sent a shudder through her whole
fabric. The engines whirled furiously until they stopped, and a couple
of minutes later her captain recognised that she could neither steam nor
steer. Meanwhile, the tide was setting strongly i