Popular Science Monthly 



839 



What Happens in the Stokehold of the 

 Speeding Destroyer 



THE soldiers wliu tight with least recog- 

 nition in the battles at sea are the 

 stokers of the destroyers running at full 

 speed. Eight men work under the com- 

 mand of a stoker petty officer, in a space 

 so narrow that movement of any kind seems 

 impossible. There is a furnace in front and 

 one in the back. Sandwiched in between 

 is a maze of levers, pipes, pumps and gear. 

 \'et within these close quarters the stokers 

 find space to perform their heart-breaking 

 toil in an atmosphere almost too hot to 

 breathe. When the men are at their posts, 

 the iron hatch is closed down and the air 

 sucked in through a ventilator has to pass 

 through the furnace before it gets to them. 

 So long as the pumps work well and the 

 evaporated w'ater is displaced with auto- 

 matic regularity by fresh, neither the tubes 

 nor the boiler casing can get dangerously 

 hot. But sometimes without apparent 

 cause, the water slowly descends below the 

 level. Sometimes the cause of 

 is a leakage — a pipe broken 

 joint strained that allows the 

 water to escape. If it can be 

 remedied, well and good. But 

 if not and the w^ater con- 

 tinues to drop steadily, the 

 stoker pett^' officer has but 

 one duty to perform — to 

 keep the hatchway from 

 being opened by the fren- 

 zied stokers, thus allowing 

 the flames to escape and 

 destroy the entire vessel. 

 The heroes w'ho perish in 

 the stokeholds like so 

 many rats caught in a fiery 

 trap are not c\'en listed. 



The Sentinels of the Sky Above the 

 War-Zone Trenches 



SENTRIES and sentinels have always 

 held a prominent place in pictures and 

 histories of war-times; but it remained for 

 the present war to develop the sentinels of 

 the sky. These are lines of balloons, each 

 balloon about a rifie-shot from the next, and 

 moored about two or three miles behind the 

 front line of trenches, forming a dotted line 

 in the sky which runs roughly parallel with 

 the real front of the battle. 



With unwinking vigilance the sentinels in 

 these balloons scan the sky above and 

 around them and the earth beneath them 

 through powerful glasses. Although so 

 high up that they appear to be nothing more 

 than tiny smudges on the grayness of the 

 sky, they can pick out so small an object 

 as a suspicious-looking automobile dashing 

 along through a fog, and will signal the 

 artillery in time to stop its progress. 



