and
hurled bodily into the sea, carrying with them guns and men to
irretrievable destruction. In less than half an hour the once
impregnable fortress of Elsinore was little better than a heap of
ruins. The last shell blew up the central magazine; the
tremendous explosion was heard for miles along the coast, and
proved to be the closing act of the briefest but most deadly
great naval action in the history of war.

The Russian fleet steamed triumphantly past the silenced Cerberus
of the Sound with flashing searchlights, blazing rockets, and
jubilant salvos of blank cartridge in honour of their really
brilliant victory.

The losses of the Allied fleet, so far as they are at present
known, are distressingly heavy. We have lost the battleships
_Neptune_, _Hotspur_, _Anson_, _Superb_, _Black Prince_, and
_Rodney_, the armoured cruisers _Narcissus_, _Beatrice_, and
_Mersey_, the unarmoured cruisers _Arethusa_, _Barossa_, _Clyde_,
_Lais_, _Seagull_, _Grasshopper_, and _Nautilus_, and not less
than nineteen torpedo-boats of the first and second classes.

The Germans and Danes have lost the battleships _Kaiser Wilhelm_,
_Friedrich der Grosse_, _Dantzig_, _Viborg_, and _Funen_, five
German and three Danish cruisers, and about a dozen
torpedo-boats.

Under whatever circumstances the Russians have obtained the
assistance of the air-ship, which rendered them services that
have proved so disastrous to the Allies, there can be no doubt
but that her arrival on the scene puts a completely different
aspect on the face of affairs at sea.

I have written this telegram on board first-class torpedo-boat,
No. 87, which followed the Russian fleet from the Sound round the
Skawe. They passed through the Kattegat in two columns of line
ahead, with the air-ship apparently resting after her flight on
board one of the largest steamers. We could see her quite
distinctly by the glare of the rockets and the electric light.
She is a small three-masted vessel almost exactly resembling the
one which partially destroyed Kronstadt in the middle of March.

After rounding the Skawe, the Russian fleet steamed away westward
into the German Ocean, and we put in here to send off our
despatches. This telegram has, of course, been officially
revised, and my information, as far as it goes, can therefore b