It was now the turn of the big armoured cruisers. They were practically untouched, for the heaviest of the fighting had fallen on the battleships. A green rocket went up from the deck of the _Britain_, and was followed in about ten seconds by a blue one. The inner line of cruisers made a quarter turn to port, and began hammering into the crippled battleships and cruisers indiscriminately, while the _Leviathan_, _Good Hope_, _Powerful_ and _Terrible_ took stations between the Isle of Wight and the Sussex coast.
The _Ithuriel_ rose to her three-foot freeboard, and put in some very pretty practice with her pneumatic guns on the topworks of the cruisers. The six-funnelled _Jeanne d'Arc_ got tired of this, and made a rush at her at her full speed of twenty-three knots, with the result that the _Ithuriel_ disappeared, and three minutes afterwards there came a shock under the great cruiser's stern which sent a shudder through her whole fabric. The engines whirled furiously until they stopped, and a couple of minutes later her captain recognised that she could neither steam nor steer. Meanwhile, the tide was setting strongly in towards Spithead, and the disabled ships were drifting with it, either to capture or destruction.
The French centre had now, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. Four out of six battleships were sunk, and one had surrendered, and the _Jeanne d'Arc_ had gone down.
On the British side the _Hindustan_ had been sunk, and the _Dominion_, _Commonwealth_ and _Newfoundland_ very badly mauled, so badly indeed that it was a matter of dry-dock as quickly as possible for them. All the other battleships, including even the _Britain_ herself, were little better than wrecks to look at, so terrible had been the firestorms through which they had passed.
But for the presence of the _Ithuriel_, the British loss would of course have been much greater. It is not too much to say that her achievements spread terror and panic among the French torpedo flotilla. Under ordinary circumstances they would have taken advantage of the confusion of the battleship action to attack the line of armoured cruisers behind, but between the two lines there was the ever-present destroying angel, as they came to call her, with her silent deadly guns, her unparalleled speed, and her terrible ram. No sooner did a destroyer or torpedo boat attempt to make for a cruiser, than a shell came hissing along the water, and blew the middle out of her, or the ram crashed through her sides, and sent her in two pieces to the bottom.