NAVAL ATTACK OF FORTIFICATIONS. 
177 
the attack took place, and that when it did take place they all ran 
away from the outlying forts, and sacked the town themselves. But I 
do not think we can expect that to happen again. 
Again, in the American War, Port Royal had been hastily fortified 
by the Southerners, because they thought the Northerners might 
require it as a base for their ships—as indeed they did. The landing 
party, which was to have been the main attacking force, was not quite 
ready. The ships went in, and they found the batteries poorly con¬ 
structed, with no traverses, and they overwhelmed those batteries with 
heavy fire. The men in the batteries thought, I suppose, that it was 
not of much use hanging on, and so they evacuated the place. But 
even there it appears to me that if they had waited till nightfall, and 
set to work to remount their guns, there might have been a good deal 
more fight left. 
Again, supposing that an attack is to be made from the sea, there 
comes in another general principle of war, that you must concentrate 
your attacking force, and you must overwhelm in detail; and remember 
that your objective is to silence the works by driving the gunners 
from their guns, and then disabling or dismounting the guns. You 
have nothing to do with breaching or knocking down structures ; you 
have to get rid of the guns, because it is only the guns that will hurt 
you. For this you want superiority of fire. Superiority of fire means 
not more firing, but more hits on the target, which hits are to decide 
the action. And directly we come to consider this, we see that the 
size of the target presented by a well-designed battery is very small 
indeed. Perhaps two feet high is about all you can injure if it is an 
ordinary earthen battery; and where expense has been gone to in the 
matter of plating, and the plating is very thick the target is very 
much smaller. But, of course, anything in the way of iron-plating 
must be very difficult to fit up on shore without some masonry work to 
put it into ; and then if you come to a masonry fort I allow the target 
is very large ; but I do not suppose that anybody would ever build a 
masonry fort again. We have, unfortunately, got a fair number of 
them, but even those can be improved. But generally there are but 
very few exceptions to the general rule that the target on shore is very 
small. 
Now the target presented by a ship, as I pointed out in my last lec¬ 
ture, is very large. To begin with, there is an immense deal in a 
ship that has very little to do with her guns, but which is an essential 
part of the ship, as helping to keep her afloat, and which is quite 
unarmoured. Then again, we have to leave more than four-fifths of 
our guns entirely unarmoured ; in fact, worse than unarmoured; 
because if you look at this section which hangs behind me, you will 
see what a box of machinery a ship is now-a-days. A shell comes in, 
and not only splinters from the shell itself, but splinters from all these 
things, go to sweep the deck and make an unarmoured ship utterly 
untenable under a heavy fire. There are only, as I pointed out in the 
last lecture, in the ordinary modern fighting ship something like four 
guns which are armoured at all; and even those present quite as large 
a target as an ordinary barbette gun on shore ; and perhaps larger, 
