Page:The Invasion of 1910.djvu/158

 special editions of the papers during Wednesday printed sensational reports of the ruthless completion of the impenetrable screen covering the operations of the enemy on the whole of the East Coast.

News had, by some means, filtered through from Yarmouth that a similar landing to those at Lowestoft and Weybourne had been effected. Protected as such an operation was, by its flanks being supported by the IVth and IXth Army Corps landing on either side, the Xth Army Corps under General von Wilburg had seized Yarmouth, with its many miles of wharves and docks, which were now crowded by the lighters' craft of flotilla from the Frisian Islands.

It was known that the landing had been effected simultaneously with that at Lowestoft. The large number of cranes at the fish-docks were of invaluable use to the enemy, for there they landed guns, animals, and stores, while the provisions they found at the various ship's chandlers, and in such shops as Blagg's and the International Stores in King Street, Peter Brown's, Doughty's, Lipton's, Penny's, and Barnes's, were at once commandeered. Great stores of flour were seized in Clarke's and Press's mills, while the horse-provender mills in the vicinity supplied them with valuable forage.

The hotels in the Market Place—the Bull, the Angel, the Cambridge, and Foulsham's—were full of men billeted, while officers occupied the Star, the Crown and Anchor, and Cromwell House, as well as the Queen's opposite the Britannia Pier, and the many boarding-houses along Marine Parade. And over all the effigy of Nelson looked down in silent contemplation!

Many men, it appeared, had also been landed at the red-brick little port of Gorleston, the Cliff and Pier Hotels being also occupied by officers remaining there to superintend the landing on that side of the Yare estuary.

Beyond these few details, as far as regarded the fate of Yarmouth nothing further was at present known.

The British division at Colchester, which comprised