As darkness fell, our fleets lay between the enemy and his home ports.
During the night our heavy ships, keeping well clear of possible
mine-fields, swept down south to south and west of the Horns Reef, so
that they might pick him up in the morning. When morning came our main
fleet could find no trace of the enemy to the southward, but our
destroyer-flotillas further north had been very busy with enemy ships,
apparently running for the Horns Reef Channel. It looks, then, as if
when we lost sight of the enemy in the smoke screen and the darkness
he had changed course and broken for home astern our main fleets. And
whether that was a sound manoeuvre or otherwise, he and the still
flows of the North Sea alone can tell.
But how is a layman to give any coherent account of an affair where a
whole country's coast-line was background to battle covering
geographical degrees? The records give an impression of illimitable
grey waters, nicked on their uncertain horizons with the smudge and
blur of ships sparkling with fury against ships hidden under the curve
of the world. One sees these distances maddeningly obscured by walking
mists and weak fogs, or wiped out by layers of funnel and gun smoke,
and realises how, at the pace the ships were going, anything might be
stumbled upon in the haze or charge out of it when it lifted. One
comprehends, too, how the far-off glare of a great vessel afire might
be reported as a local fire on a near-by enemy, or _vice versa_; how a
silhouette caught, for an instant, in a shaft of pale light let down
from the low sky might be fatally difficult to identify till too late.
But add to all these inevitable confusions and misreckonings of time,
shape, and distance, charges at every angle of squadrons through and
across other squadrons; sudden shifts of the centres of the fights,
and even swifter restorations; wheelings, sweepings, and regroupments
such as accompany the passage across space of colliding universes.
Then blanket the whole inferno with the darkness of night at full
speed, and--see what you can make of it.