says Twenty-Four, meditatively. ‘What we really want if we ever go into a row is weather—lots of it. Good old gales—regular smellers. Then we could run in and beak ’em while it’s thick. I believe in beaking.’ (That belief, by the way, is curiously general in the Navy.)
‘D’you mean to say you’d ram with a tea-tray like ours? I’m glad you aren’t the skipper,’ I interrupt.
‘Oh, he’d beak like a shot, if he saw his chance. Of course, he wouldn’t beak anything our size—it ’ud be cheaper to hammer her—but take the —— (he named a ship that does not fly Our flag). If you got in on her almost anywhere she’d turn turtle. And she cost about a million and a quarter. It’s just a question of L.S.D.’
‘And what ’ud we do afterwards, please?’
‘Ah, that’s our strong point. What happened when that collier drifted down on us at Milford? It only improved our steaming power, didn’t it? We’re a regular honeycomb of compartments forward. I believe you could swipe off twenty foot of her forward, and she’d get home somehow,’ says an expert, enthusiastically.
‘Bit risky,’ says Twenty-One. ‘That ship you talked of is awfully plated up topside, but all her underpinnings are pretty weak. If you could lob in a few shell under some of those forward sponsons of hers, I believe she’d crumple up with the weight of her own guns. But (sorrowfully) you’d need a nine point two to do that properly.’
‘Beak her! Beak her! Catch her in a gale, coming out of harbour’ (the speaker named the very port). ‘It takes their people a week to get their tummies straight.’
‘Yes, but they never come out of harbour. At least they didn’t in the old days. And if they do, we sha’n’t be allowed a look-in. We shall be used for scouting—coaling all day and steaming all night. But we want those deck-tubes taken out all the same.’
‘I’d like target-practice every week,’ says another. ‘Say four times our present allowance of practice-ammunition. It ’ud wear the guns out, but it ’ud pay.’
And so the talk goes on; varying with each ship. Some of them are all for torpedoes, and have submarine vaults the size of a small church devoted to this game; but we, being what we are, are mainly for guns, and the Gunner who is in charge of the torpedoes has a hard time of it when he runs his quarterly trials.
‘A beautiful thing,’ says he, as the silver-coloured devil flops from the tube and tears away towards the mark. . . . ‘Well, I’m blowed.’ The torpedo has sheered away to the left, and now is poisoning the air with its garlic-scented Holmes light, fifty yards from the target.
‘What did I tell you?’ says some one sotto voce. ‘We could have got in a dozen shots from the four inch while you were touching off that boomerang.’
‘They’d hang you on the —— if you laughed at torpedoes.’
‘I wouldn’t if ours were submerged, but with these deck-tubes one never knows how they’ll take the water. That thing must have canted as it fell.’
The Gunner looks grieved to the quick, but is presently consoled by a few score pounds of guncotton, and goes off with grapnels and batteries to practise ‘sweeping’ and ‘creeping’ at the mouth of the bay with a few score other boats. They mine and countermine expeditiously in the Channel Fleet. The process is a technical one, and need not be described here, for there is no necessity to make public either the area covered with mines or the time that it took to lay them. The Gunner returned with a detailed account and some fish that had been stunned by concussion.
‘It was a nice little show,’ he said. ‘A very nice little show. Did you happen to see our smoke?’
I had seen one end of Bantry Bay ripped up from its foundations, but did not inquire farther.
‘Man and Arm Boats’
Many things are impressive and not a few terrifying in the Fleet, but the most impressive sight of all is the swift casting-forth from the trim black sides of the instruments and ministers of death. They vary hourly, according to the taste and fancy of the speller. A wisp of signals floats from the Flagship. Our little cruiser erupts—boils like a hive—and some one takes out a watch. There is a continuous low thunder of bare feet, a clatter, always subdued, of arms snatched from the racks, a creaking of falls and blocks, and the noise of iron doors opening and shutting. Of a sudden the decks stand empty; the Maxims have gone from the bulwarks, and the big cutters are away, pulling mightily for the Flagship. From each one of our twelve neighbours pour forth the silent crowded boats. They cluster round the Flag, are looked over, and return. They are not merely boats with men in them. They are fully provisioned; the larger ones have boat-guns, the smaller Maxims, with a proper allowance of ammunition and spare parts, medical, chests, and all the hundred oddments necessary for independent action. All or any one of them can be used at once for patrol work or for landing parties, can be switched off from the main system, as a light engine is switched off up a siding. Each unit is complete and self-contained. In ten minutes the boats are back again, the Maxims replaced, the rifles stacked and racked, the provisions and water returned to store. The ordinary routine of ‘man and arm boats’ is over.
Landing Parties
Another signal (see Note IV.) will turn out, transport, land, embark, and disembark three thousand armed men, with twenty-one field guns, in the inside of three hours; leaving six thousand men in the ships to carry on if necessary the work of a bombardment; or you can vary the programme and load a mere thousand or so into eight identical double-funnelled fifteen-knot steam launches—one from each battleship—and play miniature Fleet-manœuvres to your heart’s content. They are as used to performing evolutions together as are their big parents. They can tow half-a-dozen cutters a-piece and work in four feet of water. As an experiment you can land your twenty-one-field guns with sufficient men to throw up earthworks round them; or you can yoke men to the guns and drag them up the flanks of mountains. Or, as in mining operations, you can turn loose all hell with a string to it—pay it out and swiftly drag it back again. One never wearies of watching the outrush and influx of the landing parties; the swift flight of the boats; the minute’s check at the beach; the torrents of blue and red pouring over the bows; and the loose-knit line of mingled red and blue winding away inland among the boulders and heather.
Long practice so perfectly conceals Art that the thing presents no points of the picturesque; makes no noise; calls for no more comment than the set of the waves before a prevailing wind. Only when you go over certain MS. books, giving the name, station, and duties of every man aboard under all conceivable contingencies, do you realise how wheel works within wheel to the ordered, effortless end.
Superior and Adequate Persons
You can disarrange the clockwork as much as you please, but the surviving cogs and rachets will still go on and finish the job; for I do honestly believe that, if any accident removed from the Fleet every single Commissioned Officer, the Warrant and Petty Officers would still carry on with resource and fertility of invention till properly relieved. The public is apt to lump everything that does not carry the executive curl on its coat-sleeve as some sort of common sailor. But a man of twenty-five years’ sea experience—cool, temperate, and judgmatic, such an one as the ordinary Warrant Officer—is a better man than you shall meet on shore in a long day’s march. His word is very much law forward. He knows his men, if possible, better than the officers. He has seen, tried, approved, and discarded hundreds of dodges and tricks in all departments of the ship. At a pinch he can wring the last ounce out of his subordinates
