94 
NAVAL ATTACK OF FORTIFICATIONS. 
attack on fortifications is likely unless those fortifications shelter ships, 
which ships you think will come out and do you more harm than the 
harm you will receive in attacking them under their fortifications. 
Briefly, I think that no fortifications need exist unless you want to 
shelter ships. I cannot myself see that fortifications can possibly 
prevent an invasion, for it would be impossible to put a Chinese wall 
around the whole country. So that fortifications must be looked upon 
as sheltering ships. 
Now, when you come to the question of attacking fortifications, a 
very different state of things prevails from that for which the ships are 
built. I have here a diagram of one of our first-class battle-ships, the 
<f Rodney.” She is one of the much-abused “ Admiral” class, but 
I do not think she is a bit worse, and she is probably considerably 
better than the foreign ships which were built at about the same time; 
and being a barbette ship, as most foreign ships are, she fairly respesents 
the average iron-clad. We call her an armoured ship : there is not 
very much armour about her, but it weighs an immense deal, amount¬ 
ing to something like, I think, one-fifth of the whole weight of the ship. 
As a matter of fact, it is a very difficult thing to protect a ship; and 
when I say “a ship,” I include all that part of the ship which is 
essential to seaworthiness. We have, of course, fighting ships— 
t( Monitors ”—which hardly show above the water; but the great 
drawback of the ships of the “ Monitor” class is that they are un- 
seawortliy. Many of the “ Monitors ” went to the bottom (as the 
original “ Monitor” herself did) because they were not fit to go to sea. 
For going to sea we must have a ship with considerable freeboard— 
the “ Admirals ” have not half enough freeboard as it is. Then we 
must be very careful to armour the water-line,- so that the water will 
not get in. In the case of the “ Rodney,” we have put a certain 
thickness of armour on the water-line, and an armoured deck over it, 
all this to make her seaworthy : after that, we have very little pro¬ 
tection left for the guns. We have two barbettes with a pair of heavy 
guns in each, but all the smaller guns are. altogether unprotected. 
They are in about the same position as if you brought a Siege gun 
into action without building any kind of battery at all; and nobody 
but a madman would think of bringing a Siege Battery into action, 
even against an incompletely or partially armed place, without any 
parapet. So that you see the only guns that can fairly cope with forts 
are these barbette guns, and even those, when you see them in their 
loading position, are very much exposed to fire. They can only load 
in their fore-and-aft position, and if you want to fight on the beam, 
they have to be trained round to load every time. 
The net result of all this is that I do not think we shall willingly 
risk our best ships against forts, and no ships but our best ships are 
fit to stand up to fortifications. 
With regard to cruisers, if you simply take away from the “ Rodney” 
all this belt of armour and the barbettes with their guns, and thin 
down the armoured deck to about half its thickness, then you have 
left the 6-inch guns unprotected. Instead of the big chase guns, put 
one unprotected gun fighting fore and aft respectively, and there you 
