here in the darkness overhead. The destroyers patrolled to seaward
of the small craft.

[Sidenote: The signal is given for the guns to open.]

The _Vindictive_, always at that solemn gait of hers, found the
flagship's light-buoy and bore up for where a coastal motor-boat,
commanded by Lieutenant William R. Slayter, R.N., was waiting by a
calcium flare upon the old position of the Stroom Bank buoy. Four
minutes before she arrived there, and fifteen minutes only before she
was due at the harbor mouth, the signal for the guns to open was given.
Two motor-boats dashed in towards the ends of the high wooden piers and
torpedoed them. There was a machine-gun on the end of the western pier,
and that vanished in the roar and the leap of flame and debris which
called to the guns. Over the town a flame suddenly appeared high in air,
and sank slowly earthwards--the signal that the aeroplanes had seen and
understood; and almost coincident with their first bombs came the first
shells whooping up from the monitors at sea. The surprise part of the
attack was sprung.

[Sidenote: The attack is a complete surprise.]

The surprise, despite the German's watchfulness, seems to have been
complete. Up till the moment when the torpedoes of the motor-boats
exploded, there had not been a shot from the land--only occasional
routine star-shells. The motor-launches were doing their work
magnificently. These pocket-warships, manned by officers and men of the
Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, are specialists at smoke-production; they
built to either hand of the _Vindictive's_ course the likeness of a
dense sea-mist driving landward with the wind. The star-shells paled and
were lost as they sank in it; the beams of the searchlights seemed to
break off short upon its front. It blinded the observers of the great
batteries when suddenly, upon the warning of the explosions, the guns
roared into action.

[Sidenote: Heavy batteries on the Ostend coast open fire.]

There was a while of tremendous uproar. The coast about Ostend is
ponderously equipped with batteries, each with its name known and
identified: Tirpitz, Hindenburg, Deutschland, Cecilia, and the rest;
they register from six inches up to monsters of fifteen-inch naval
pieces in land-turrets, and the Royal Marine Artillery fights a war-long
duel with them. These now opened fire into the smoke and over it at the
monitors; the Marines and the monitors replied; and, meanwhile, the
aeroplanes were bo