Volume 2 — Sir Christopher Cradock.

By JOHN E. DOLSON.

Through the fog of the fight we could dimly see,

As ever the flame from the big guns flashed,

That Cradock was doomed, yet his men and he,

With their plates shot to junk, and their turrets smashed,

Their ship heeled over, her funnels gone,

Were fearlessly, doggedly fighting on.

Out-speeded, out-metaled, out-ranged, out-shot

By heavier guns, they were not out-fought.

Those men—with the age-old British phlegm,

That has conquered and held the seas for them,

And the courage that causes the death-struck man

To rise on his mangled stumps and try,

With one last shot from his heated gun,

To score a hit ere his spirit fly,

Then sink in the welter of red, and die

With the sighting squint fixed on his dead, glazed eye—

Accepted death as part of the plan.

So the guns belched flame till the fight had run

Into night; and now, in the distance dim,

We could see, by the flashes, the dull, dark loom

Of their hull, as it bore toward the Port of Doom,

Away on the water's misty rim—

Cradock and his few hundred men,

Never, in time, to be seen again.

While into the darkness their great shells streamed,

Little the valiant Germans dreamed

That Cradock was teaching them how to go

When the fate their daring, itself, had sealed,

Waiting, as yet, o'er the ocean's verge,

To their eyes undaunted would stand revealed;

And, snared by a swifter, stronger foe,

Out-classed, out-metaled, out-ranged, out-shot

By heavier guns, but not out-fought,

They, too, would sink in the sheltering surge.