mbing methodically and the anti-craft guns were
searching the skies for them, Star-shells spouted up and floated down,
lighting the smoke banks with spreading green fires; and those strings
of luminous green balls, which airmen call "flaming onions," soared up
up to lose themselves in the clouds. Through all this stridency and
blaze of conflict, the old _Vindictive_, still unhurrying, was walking
the lighted waters towards the entrance.

It was then that those on the destroyers became aware that what had
seemed to be merely smoke was wet and cold, that the rigging was
beginning to drip, that there were no longer stars--a sea-fog had come
on.

[Sidenote: Destroyers keep in touch by lights and sirens.]

The destroyers had to turn on their lights and use their sirens to keep
in touch with each other; the air attack was suspended, and
_Vindictive_, with some distance yet to go, found herself in gross
darkness.

[Sidenote: The fog and smoke are dense.]

[Sidenote: A motor-boat leads the way for _Vindictive_.]

There were motor-boats to either side of her, escorting her to the
entrance, and these were supplied with what are called Dover
flares--enormous lights capable of illuminating square miles of sea at
once. A "Very" pistol was fired as a signal to light these; but the fog
and the smoke together were too dense for even the flares. _Vindictive_
then put her helm over and started to cruise to find the entrance. Twice
in her wanderings she must have passed across it, and at her third turn,
upon reaching the position at which she had first lost her way, there
came a rift in the mist, and she saw the entrance clear, the piers to
either side and the opening dead ahead. The inevitable motor-boat dashed
up, raced on into the opening under a heavy and momentarily growing
fire, and planted a flare on the water between the piers. _Vindictive_
steamed over it and on. She was in.

[Sidenote: A hail of lead falls upon the _Vindictive_.]

The guns found her at once. She was hit every few seconds after she
entered, her scarred hull broken afresh in a score of places and her
decks and upper works swept. The machine-gun on the end of the western
pier had been put out of action by the motor-boat's torpedo, but from
other machine-guns at the inshore ends of the pier, from a position on
the front, and from machine-guns apparently firing over the eastern
pier, there converged upon her a hail of lead. The after-control was
demolished