410 



Popular Science Monthly 



pay clerk to his assigned post, bluejackets 

 and marines to the ammunition passages 

 and their hoists. There is not a man aboard 

 who has not his post, and down in the hull 

 of the ship are the men of the engine-room 

 force ready to give her every ounce of 

 needed power. 



Every man who passes has a patch of 

 fleecy cotton peeping out of his ears and as 

 you dig in your pocket for some, a blue- 

 jacket halts long enough to caution you to 

 pack it in lightly and not to hold your 

 hands over your ears. 



The turn of your ship to fire at its target 

 has not yet come, but off to port or star- 

 board you see a vivid sheet of flame leap 

 out from the turret gun of another ship 

 that is on the range. A cloud of smoke 

 hugs the water alongside her and a great 

 roar grows with each second. It is like 

 the thunder of railroad engines, racing at 

 full speed over a bridge. You see her shell 

 strike the water and throw up a geyser of 

 white foam. On beyond it other and 

 smaller geysers rear their white columns 

 when the shell ricochets, skimming across 

 the sea in bounds as a stone thrown by a 

 lad skims across a mill pond. 



A still more thunderous roar comes 

 across the water 

 when a salvo, or 

 broadside, is let loose 

 and each shell, as it 

 strikes, sends up its 

 whirling column of 

 water. 



So far you are but 

 an idle participant 

 in the great game, 

 watching it at a safe 

 distance. Your ship 

 is at last on the 

 range and the order 

 to fire has been 

 flashed to one of the 

 turret guns. A 

 mighty blast rocks 

 the mass of steel beneath your feet 

 and it slides to port from the drive of it. 

 The military masts, for all the world like 

 inverted waste baskets, whip over to one 

 side like a bent fishpole and you grin and 

 try to affect the calm of a true sailorman. 

 If you have been alert you have caught 

 fleeting impressions of vivid white sheets 

 of flame, great blurs of orange-colored 

 vapors, and you grasp the nearest support 

 and strain your eyes toward the target. 



The "spotters," with eyes glued to their 



Stripped to the waist the casemate crew 

 keep the big guns bellowing at the target 

 as it moves through the water miles away 



glasses watch for it too, and pass below 

 their judgment of the range. If the range 

 is good the first salvo will tear the water 

 near the target into boiling geysers. A hit 

 will pass through the screen of netting and 

 cloth and will add its bit to the fight for 

 the gunnery honors. Now and then when 

 a two-gun turret launches its shells simul- 

 taneously, and the range is perfect, a 

 "straddle" shot is the result, one just over 

 and the other just short of the bobbing 

 target. Field artillerymen call it a 



"bracket" and it is rarely that two shells 

 fired at exactly the same range will not 

 show this dispersion. 



Other ships are firing, loosing their eight, 

 ten, twelve or fourteen-inch shells at their 

 targets. It is a deep-sea spectacle that 

 would have driven Nero or Barnum into 

 hiding for pure shame. Wherevef you look 

 towards the targets you see flying jets of 

 water, churning green sea to white. The 

 air is filled with lightning-like flashes and 

 the rolling clouds of vari-colored smoke. 

 The dull boom of big guns plays through 

 it all. 



If you were privileged to enter one of 

 the big turrets you would carry away with 

 you a jumbled impression of its activities — 

 a gun crew stripped 

 to the waist with the 

 light 'of battle in 

 their eyes; an in- 

 terior white as a 

 hospital ward and 

 just as clean; a gun- 

 pointer with his eye 

 placed against the 

 rubber eye-piece of 

 his telescopic sight 

 with the cross wires 

 centered on the tar- 

 get. In recent prac- 

 tices our ships have 

 fired at ranges and 

 broken world's 

 records that a few 

 years ago were hardly dreamed of. 



The turretj are far from the noisiest part 

 of the ship, for the walls of armor deaden 

 the deafening roar that greets you on deck. 

 It is quiet in the interior of a big turret, 

 with its whirring, smashing, clanking fury, 

 its snakelike hiss of compressed air that 

 blows unburned particles of powder and 

 powder bag lining out through the muzzle 

 before the breech is swung open, but quiet 

 only when compared with the racket on 

 deck. And it would, if you could enter it 



