The London _Daily Telegraph’s_ Harwich correspondent gives further
narratives of the Heligoland fight gleaned from British sailors. They
say that many of the German shells which made hits did not burst, and to
that fact they attribute the comparative lightness of the British
casualty list.
“There were five shells in the boiler of the ----,” said one of them,
mentioning the name of a destroyer. “If one of them had burst--well it
would have been all up with the ship.”
“What did you do with them?” he was asked.
“Oh, we just shied them overboard. We’ve no room for such rubbish aboard
our yacht.”
In another instance it is related that a shell fell on the deck of a
British ship. There was no immediate explosion. The sailors rushed at it
and pushed it into the sea.
One incident has been described which shows the grit of the German
sailors.
“We were hard at it with a German cruiser,” he said, “and she was in a
bad way, on the point of sinking. We could see her decks were in an
awful mess and her stern was in flames. It had been shot away. We could
see only one man on the forecastle, but he was a plucky one. He hoisted
a flag, and it was still there when the ship went down. I suppose he
went down with her.”