high out of the water, and the other a converted liner. Kurt was
at the end of the gallery, a little apart from the others.

"Gott!" he said at last, lowering his binocular, "it is like
seeing an old friend with his nose cut off--waiting to be
finished. Der Barbarossa!"

With a sudden impulse he handed his glass to Bert, who had peered
beneath his hands, ignored by every one, seeing the three ships
merely as three brown-black lines upon the sea.

Never had Bert seen the like of that magnified slightly hazy
image before. It was not simply a battered ironclad that
wallowed helpless, it was a mangled ironclad. It seemed
wonderful she still floated. Her powerful engines had been her
ruin. In the long chase of the night she had got out of line
with her consorts, and nipped in between the Susquehanna and the
Kansas City. They discovered her proximity, dropped back until
she was nearly broadside on to the former battleship, and
signalled up the Theodore Roosevelt and the little Monitor. As
dawn broke she had found herself hostess of a circle. The fight
had not lasted five minutes before the appearance of the Hermann
to the east, and immediately after of the Furst Bismarck in the
west, forced the Americans to leave her, but in that time they
had smashed her iron to rags. They had vented the accumulated
tensions of their hard day's retreat upon her. As Bert saw her,
she seemed a mere metal-worker's fantasy of frozen metal
writhings. He could not tell part from part of her, except by
its position.