178 
NAVAL ATTACK OK FORTIFICATIONS. 
because you must remember that a shell coming under here (pointing 
to the section ) may very likely upset the loading gear, and in many 
cases the loading gear could be upset by a shell which would not 
pierce the armour of the turret or barbette. 
On the other hand, on shore there is nothing vulnerable except the 
gun ; there is no earthly reason why you should put anything else under 
fire, you can keep your men well down under the parapet, and it 
is only the gun that can be hit. So that to get a moderate number of 
hits from the ship we want a great number of guns. In the old days 
I believe it was considered that the odds which would justify a ship 
in attacking a battery with any chance of success were something like 
three or four to one in number of guns. That has been varied a good 
deal, but I think on the whole we may consider that nothing less than 
that would do at all. In the cases where the ships have had fewer guns 
we can explain their success in other ways. In the case of Fort Henry, 
which was attacked by the Northern gunboats on the Mississippi, 
the guns afloat were only about three to two of the guns on shore. 
They were more powerful with regard to weight of projectiles in the 
proportion of about two to one. But the guns afloat were all very well 
protected, and none of the guns on shore could pierce the armour which 
protected the guns afloat. On the other hand, the guns ashore were 
apparently not so well protected even as they might have been by 
earth ; they were not well traversed ; the carriages were low, and the 
parapets, therefore, were very low. Altogether the shore batteries 
were not good specimens. It is interesting to note that only a few 
days later the same gunboats attacked somewhat similar batteries at 
Fort Donaldson. A great deal is made in some of the accounts of the 
fact that the batteries at Fort Donaldson were elevated above the 
river, but this elevation only turns out to have been 82 feet, and 82 
feet does not really make all that difference. I think the real differ¬ 
ence was that they had had their experience at Fort Henry, and they 
turned that experience to good account in strengthening the parapets, 
and therefore they beat off the gunboats at Fort Donaldson. 
At Alexandria at one time there was not much difference between 
the number of guns ashore in the outer works and the number of 
guns afloat. The outer works had about 21 heavy guns bearing, 
whereas the three ships, the Superb,” the “ Alexandra,” and the 
“ Sultan/’ had 20 guns on the engaged side. And so long as those 
three ships attacked all the 21 guns indiscriminately, by steaming up 
and down, there was not much disparity. If the shore guns had only 
shot a little straighter, I do not know that the ships would have got 
very much the best of it. The gunners on shore were miserably bad, 
and their firing was very bad ; but as soon as we came to the conclusion 
that that was a very bad way to attack those forts, and confined an 
attack to the batteries at one end of the line leaving the other bat¬ 
teries out of action, then we had only about 10 guns at most opposed 
to our 20, we made head at once, and we were scarcely hit again after 
that, because the people on shore who shot crooked at first, as they 
got more frightened shot more crooked still, and finally stopped firing 
altogether. 
