It would surely require the pen of a Dante to depict all the horrors
that were happening on the German cruiser _Mainz_, as she went down.
We knew that she was burning. The men stayed at their guns until the
flames actually began to burn up their legs. The wounded lay in heaps
on the deck and the flames destroyed them without help. The blood ran
on the decks so that the men who were still trying to work the light
deck guns slipped in it and fell.
Our shells passed through their hospital ward and killed the wounded
and the surgeons as they were working over them. That any men could
have passed through such an ordeal and retained their senses is a
tribute to the wonderful effect of naval training and discipline.
The _Fearless_ appears to have borne a somewhat charmed life--a large
number of shells pitched just short and just over her--she was hit
fair and square by seven, one of which played a lot of havoc with the
middle deck forward and the mess gear there. Her sides showed some
twenty-three holes of varying size, and yet her list of casualties was
only eight wounded, none dangerously. She also had two narrow escapes
from being torpedoed, one torpedo passing just forward from an unknown
source, and another aft from a submarine.
During comparative lulls I went onto the upper deck once or twice,
to visit the forward station and to see that all was correct. For
suppressed excitement and vivid interest I should say the seeker after
sensation could scarcely ask for more than a modern naval action.
The shells were falling all about us, and why we were not sunk I can
never understand. The captain kept the ship zigzagging on her course
to upset the enemy's aim. At one time we came within 2,000 yards of
the Mainz, which had already been partly wrecked by the long-distance
fire from our big battle cruisers, the _Lion_, _Invincible_, and _Queen
Mary_. It was our duty to help finish her without sinking our big ships.
She made two attempts to torpedo us. I watched one torpedo skimming
through the water like a shark about ten yards from the bow, as it
seemed to me. We just escaped it by a turn of the wheel in the nick of
time. Then another skimmed by our stern, running over the spot we had
left only a minute before.
"She's a goner," I heard one of our men say. The German cruiser was
a burning wreck, but she kept the two small guns, one at each end,
firing away to the last. Then one of our destroyers rushed in to close
quarters and gave her the finishing blow with a torpedo.