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Show UK? iS British Vessels Sunk in Attack At-tack on Harbor Almost Block Channel. English Naval Ensign Is Hoisted Over Ruined En, Structures. . By WALTER pTJRANTY. : .. (New York Times-Chicago Tribune Cable, Copyright.) BRUGES, Oct. 26. I visited Zeebruggc yesterday, the scene of one of the most ;:, audacious exploits in the war's history. -Alothe coast from Biankenburg, the S-lSpJhills separating the roads from the Tbeach were honeycombed with battery j positions, succeeding one another absolute-,; absolute-,; Jy without Interval. There must have been hundreds of gut's, varying from six j to twelve inches, and lots of big shells : still left by the Germans. Everywhere j, one could see long muzzles turned sea-H) sea-H) wards. As Zeebruggc- drew near, gun t emplacements in many cases were oblit-' oblit-' erated by gaping craters fifty feet across, j made by aerial torpedoes or projectiles ;of the hugest English naval cannon. The port of Zeebrugge made a striking strik-ing picture in the bright middiy sun-shine. sun-shine. Just at the right of the little j! group of hotels and villas that formed I the town begins a long mole, its en- trance commanded by a battery of six-3 six-3 Inch guns still intact,- but after running 'Out a hundred yards into the sea it curves northwards for the length of half a mile Q(. parallel with the shore, fl. This morning in the sheltered harbor in 1 front of the mouth of Bruges canal, ', wnich enters the sea between two long f piers, some 600 yards north of the town, I': tiie tide was low and the wrecks of J sunken ships stood high out of the water. If Close against the mole nearly at the end. and beyond it. were ether unknown ves-EU ves-EU Eels. Nearer the coast was a dredger sunk by the Germans. Then exactly off q the end of the canal was the wreck of the Thetis, the old British warship sunk Sin the famous attack. Between the still smoldering timbers of the burnt pier, I could distinguish other British ships, the concrete wall, twenty feet high and thirty across, gave way to timbers of the pier work under which the tide swept right up to the harbor. It was a forty-yard gap in ihe mole, torn by the explosion of the British submarine crammed to the hatches with T. N. T. and driven headlong head-long against the breakwater on the night of the attack. The inhabitants of Bruges, twelve miles, away, were startled by that terrific blast which dwarfed the roar of the bombardment, bombard-ment, the heaviest in their experience. The Germans soon bridged the gap with a pier solid enough to bear the rail- i.Iphigenta and the Intrepid, long battered masses of twisted rusty iron. j Mine Is Fired. J Suddenly there came the rat-a-tat of machine guns from the flotilla of motor l launches grouped off the end of the mole j and a moment later an enormous column Jy of mud and water rose a hundred feet T . in the air. followed by an earsplitting ex-J ex-J nlosion as the bullets fired on of the -f mines that had formed the barrage at : . thfi northern end of the hnrbor. I walked as far as possible along the ' i 'iota After twFni -five vnrds the solid road, but the rush of water through it was steadily silting on the harbor and rendered it almost useless in rough water. Just where the farther end of the pier rejoined the stone work the timbers had been dvnH.mited by the Germans and a five-yard hole, over which drooped broken rails, barred further progress. Flag Is Hoisted. I made my way across shore to the entrance en-trance of the canal, a short distance from the wreck of the Thetis. At the same moment a party from one of the motor , launches boarded the wreck in a small boat and hoisted the white ensign of the Royal navy over the glorious ruin. Their commander sent a boat for me and I scrambled aboard. He proved to be the captain who conducted the operations op-erations of the motor launch flotilla in the attack on Ostend, and was now engaged en-gaged in destroying the mines, wnoreof more have been located, but not yet accounted ac-counted for. He had come to hoist the flasr on the Thetis and try to get a souvenir sou-venir for the admiral, but the Bodies had stripped the wreck of every scrap of brasswork and the captain was forced to be content with an iron ring bolt. We pulled thirty yards up the canal to where the Iphigcnia lay. nearly at right angles across the channel. The top of her bow touched the northern bank and her stern was perhaps fifteen feet from the other side. The Intrepid lay some ten yards -farther on. She was a considerably consid-erably smaller vessel and lay almost parallel par-allel with the shore, but m such a position posi-tion as to increase the difficulty of passing pass-ing the narrow gap . at the Iphigenia's stern. The captain told me that the Germans Ger-mans had left intact the big lockgate. whose destruction would have interfered in working the whole sluice system. The sluices also were uninjured and what is more remarkable, the Solway electric works, a mile upstream, which supplied the power for the whole canal, suffered no worse damage than could be repaired in a fortnight. |