Not a German had received the slightest injury; fourteen hundred Englishmen had been killed. It was the loss of these trained officers and seamen, and not that of three old cruisers that would soon have been sent to the scrap heap, that was felt by the British navy. Realizing that no fears for their own lives would keep the officers of a British ship from attempting to rescue the drowning crew of another, the Admiralty issued the following order:
“It has been necessary to point out for the future guidance of his Majesty’s ships that the conditions that prevail when one vessel of a squadron is injured in a mine-field or exposed to submarine attack are analogous to those which occur in an action and that the rule of leaving disabled ships to their own resources is applicable, so far at any rate as large vessels are concerned. No act of humanity, whether to friend or foe, should lead to a neglect of the proper precautions and dispositions of war, and no measures can be taken to save life which prejudice the military situation.”
Another old cruiser, the _Hermes_, that had been turned into a floating base for sea-planes, was torpedoed off Dunkirk by a German submarine, most of the crew being rescued by French torpedo boats. On New Year’s day, 1915, the battleship _Formidable_ was likewise sent to the bottom of the English Channel. She too was a rather old ship, of the same class as the _Bulwark_, which had been destroyed by an internal explosion two weeks earlier in the Medway, and the _Irresistible_, afterwards sunk by a mine in the Dardanelles.
But there was nothing small or old about the _Audacious_. She was--or is--a 24,800 ton superdreadnought, launched in 1911 and carrying ten thirteen-and-a-half-inch guns. This stupendous war-engine was found rolling helpless in the Irish Sea, her after compartments flooded by a great hole made either by a drifting mine or, what is more likely considering its position, by a torpedo from a German submarine. The White Star liner _Olympic_, which had been summoned by wireless, took the disabled warship in tow for several hours, after which the _Audacious_ was cast off and abandoned. A photograph taken by one of the _Olympic’s_ passengers and afterwards widely circulated shows the huge ironclad down by the stern, listing heavily to one side, and apparently on the point of sinking. But her loss has never been admitted by the British Admiralty, and it has been repeatedly declared by reputable persons that the _Audacious_ was kept afloat till the _Olympic_ was out of sight, and was then towed by naval vessels into Belfast, where she was drydocked and repaired at Harland and Wolff’s shipyard to be sent back to the fighting line. Her fate is one of the most interesting of the many mysteries of the war and will probably not be made clear till peace has come. The silence of the British Admiralty is explained by the standing orders forbidding the revealing of the whereabouts of any of his Majesty’s ships, particularly when helpless and disabled. It should be noted in this connection that the German government has never admitted the loss of the battleship _Pommern_ which the Russians insist was sunk by one of their submarines in the Baltic.