There was a mist on the sea. It was after midnight when they crawled in
toward the coast. It was in December, and they could just about make
out the white city of Trieste. The two boats stole toward the harbor.
One of the chief problems of Rizzo was that of the huge steel cables
attached to the nets; but these he managed to cut apart, thus making
his way through the nets.
They came nearer the harbor. It is an affair of three piers, making
two channels. These channels were closed by booms and nets. Mines were
linked to the piers by great steel hawsers.
The boats crept up to one pier. Rizzo climbed up and took in the
situation. There was nobody on that pier. On the middle pier, however,
was a guardroom. There could be heard the sound of voices in that room,
and the barking of dogs, and the monotonous rhythms of the sentry
patrolling the middle pier.
“Lieutenant Rizzo,” Percival Gibbon wrote to the New York _Times_,
“crawled back and gave the order, and up came his men, crawling on
hands and knees over the concrete, passing the big cutting tools from
hand to hand, groping their way to the cables. Some set to work to cut
them, while two men scanned the shore lest some sentry should arrive.
“The cutting instruments worked well. It needed only a strong jar to
set the mines exploding, but the cutters bit their way through strand
after strand of twisted steel wire. Three cables above water were
severed without trouble; the five more below; water were grappled and
hauled to the surface and cut in their turn.
“At last the weight of the net and its attachments tore the last steel
strands asunder, the whole great cobweb of metal and explosives sank,
and the harbor lay open. Rizzo and his men crawled back to their boats.
Those boats moved like shadows toward the _Wien_ and the _Monarch_.
Rizzo backed off till he had his enemy at 150 yards. His second boat,
commanded by the old petty officer, shifted out upon his beam to get a
line which cleared the _Wien’s_ bow and commanded the _Monarch’s_ great
steel flank. Rizzo raised his arm in that gloom and saw the answering
gesture of the petty officer. It was the moment to let her go. In a
second four long steel devils were sliding through the water for the
enemy.
“A roar, a blast of flame, a waterspout raining on them, and a second
roar as the _Monarch_, too, got her dose.
“A searchlight flashed out from the _Wien_ and sawed at the darkness.
A scream sounded over the water: _Wer da?_ (Who’s there?) There
were shoutings and stampings along the deck of the wounded ship,
searchlights waking along the shore and on the breakwaters, and
anti-aircraft guns arousing everywhere. No one in Trieste knew whence
the attack had come, whether from air or sea. The sky was festooned
with bursting shell, while the ships in the harbor opened with their
guns toward the harbor mouth, shelling the mist of the Adriatic at
random. By the light of that furious illumination the Italian sailors
saw the great bulk of the _Wien_ listing toward them.
“By this time they were making for the harbor mouth. Shells spouted all
around them, but not one hit them, and both boats saw before they left
that last subsidence, that wriggle and resignation with which a great
ship goes under.”