March 7, 191 8 
Land & Water 
7 
sessing great mobility, he would have thought you were 
laughing at him. 
Well, that was in August, IQ14. In February, 1015, I saw 
the castings of that very gun already in being — the great 
French 400. I had to hold m\- tyngue about it. of course. 
and did, until the piece appeared in the field. What I said 
to th(jse who were showing it to me was what I think anybody 
would have said who was interested in such subjects : That 
the mere making of such a gun for use on land was, of course, 
possible, though it could have no such platform : but that 
I could not conceive how the recoil could be absorbed. 
Further, I said that it could not have any mobility, and yet 
mobilit\- was essential to the use of such a gun. The last 
question was immediately answered. The gun would move 
upon railwavs of the normal gauge. This, I said, solved 
the problem of mobility, but made still more impossible of 
solution the problem of absorbing the recoil. I could not 
be told the secret of this last and essential solution, but I 
was told it had been made, and, as we all know, these enor- 
mous pieces came forward in the second year of the war ; 
they completelv absorbed their recoil. The first few shells 
from this piece, by the way, destroyed the railway station of 
Peronne, in which three trains were standing packed with 
troops. 
- Tliat is only one example of what I mean when I say that 
after each imexpectcd enemy success civilisation catches up. 
Innumerable other examples will occur to every technical, 
reader of these pages, and I think to most other general 
readers as well. The enemy introduced poison gas to the 
horror of civilisation ; but the civilised nations quickly beat 
him at his own game. He had prepared defensive methods 
against such a gas. We elaborated better ones. He came 
into the field with a just appreciation of the machine-gun 
and of trench weapons, in which we were hopelessly behind- 
hand. We produced more, if not better, of the one, and 
certainlv better of the otlier. He took it upon himself to 
bombard civilians in open towns from the air — another- 
abomination hitherto unheard of, and indeed strictly for- 
bidden by conventions to which he had put his own hand. ^ 
We devised defences against such action superior to his own 
and we are now appearing as his superior even in that last 
deplorable development, which he himself chose, inaugurated, 
and must now suffer from. 
Now of all this the enemy is just afs well aware as we are. 
We were catching him up foot by foot and passing him 
when he got his first respite through the inability of the 
Eastern Slavs to munition them.selves, lacking as they did 
industrial power. He got his second when he brought in 
the King of Bulgaria after the usual diplomatic treachery 
and promises of neutrality, and the rest. But that advan- 
tage was in its turn countered. The West began to pour 
munitions into Russia ; the advance to the Mediterranean 
was held ; the Turkish forces, which he was now able to 
organise and munition through Bulgaria, were beaten in 
their attack on Egypt, and were gradually pressed back on 
their own soil. His double offensive in the West — Verdun 
and the Trentino — failed. Our counter offensive pressed 
him and exhausted him throughout iqi(). 
His third and greatest respite he has just obtained. 
Following upon the heavy effect of the submarine warfare 
before we had begun to catch up on that also, he enjoyed 
what was for him the good fortune of the Russian Revolu- 
tion, and the subsequent disintegration of the Russian State. 
We all know the fruits of that last and most important of 
his successes. They, were apparent in Italy, and they are 
apparent in the present concentration upon the Western 
front. But the process by which the superior invariably 
dominates the inferior at last, in spite of any accident or 
any surprise, the process, but for which civilisation would 
long ago have disappeared under the attacks of barbarism, 
is again at work. Again we find the process exasperating us 
by its slowness, but again, if we will regard it as a necessary 
inevitable growth, we can watch it in security. The pro- 
duction of machinery and of mmiitions, of offensive and 
defensive armament catches up. If you had before y6u the 
curves representing, for instance, submarine warfare, or the 
building of new tonnage, or the recruitment of American 
soldiers, or the rate of their transport to Europe, any one of 
the many incidental curves upon which the future is cal- 
culated — j-ou would see in their aggregate (in spite of fluctua- 
tions such as the fall in tonnage since January ist) this 
movement of increasing strength against the corresponding 
curves of the enemy. And the enemy has those calculations 
before him just as we have ; though we know our own figures 
more accurately and he his own. This third element in the 
situation is,, even more than the rest, compelling him to 
seek a negotiated peace. 
H. Belloc. 
A Battleship at Sea: By Lewis R. Freeman, r.n. 
V.R. 
So vivid a description of the ivalch at}d ward which the 
British Fleet keeps round these islands in all weathers 
has not before been published. Lieutenant Freeman, 
R.N.V.R., narrates his actual experiences in a winter 
cruise on a battleship in the North Sea. 
THE collier had come alongside a little after seven 
— two hours before daybreak at the time of 
year — and I awoke in my cabin on the boat deck 
just abaft the forward turret to the grind of the 
winches and the steady tramp-tramp of the 
barrow-pushers on the decks below. 
On my way aft to the ward-room for breakfast, I stopped 
for a moment by a midships hatch, where the commander, 
grimed to the eyes, stamped his sea-boots and threshed his 
arms as a substitute for the warming exercise the men were 
getting behind the shovels and the barrows. He it was who 
was responsible— partly through systematisation, partly 
through infusing his own energetic spirit into the men them- 
selves—for the fact that the " Zeus " held the Blue Ribbon, or 
the Black Ribbon, or whatever one would call the. premier 
honours of the Grand Fleet for speedy coaling. Not un- 
naturally, therefgre, he was a critical man when it came to 
passing judgment on the shifting of "Number i Welsh 
Steam" from hold to bunkers, and it was not necessarily to 
be expected that he would echo my enthusiasm when I told 
him that this was quite the smartest bit of coaling I had ever 
seen west of Nagasaki, something quite worth stancling, shiver- 
ing tooth to tooth, with a raw north wind, to be a witness of. 
"It's fair," he admitted grudgingly, "only fair. A shade 
over. 300 tons an hour, perhaps. 'Twould have seemed good 
enough before we put up the Grand Fleet record of 408. 
Trouble is, they haven't anything to put 'em on their mettle 
this morning. Now, if some other ship had come within 
fifty or sixty tons of their record this last week, or if we'd 
had a rush order to get ready to go to sea— then you might 
have hoped to see coaling that was coaling." 
Copyright in the Cnited State*. 
All through my porridge and eggs and bacon the steady 
tramp of the barrow-men on the quarter-deck throbbed 
along the steel plates of the ward-room ceiling, and it must 
have been about the time I was spreading my marmalade 
(real marmalade, not the synthetic substitute one comes 
face to face with ashore these days) that I seemed to sense 
a quickening of the movepient, not through any rush-bang 
acceleration, but rather through gradually becoming aware 
of increased force in action, as when the engines of a steamer 
speed up from "half" to "full." In a few moments an 
overalled figure, with a face coal-dusted till it looked like 
the face of the end-man in a minstrel show, lounged in to 
remark casually behind the day before yesterday morning's 
paper that we had just gone on "two hours' notice." A 
half-hour later, as the gouged-out collier edged jerkily away 
under the impulse of her half-submerged screw, the com- 
mander, a gleam of quiet satisfaction in his steady eyes, 
remarked that "it wasn't such a bad finish, after all," adding 
that "the men seemed keen to get her out to sea and let the 
wind blow through her." 
The ship's post-coaling clean up — usually as elaborate 
an affair as a Turkish bath, with rub down and massage — 
was no more than a douche with "a lick and a promise." 
Anything more for a warship putting off into the North Sea 
in midwinter would be about as superfluous as for a man to 
wash his face and comb his hair before taking a plunge in 
the surf. 
Once that perfunctory wash-down was over, all ti^aces of 
rush disappeared. What little remained to be done after 
that — even including getting ready for action — was so 
ordered and endlessly rehearsed that nothing short of an 
enemy salvo or a sea heavy enough to carry away something 
of importance need be productive of a really hurried move- 
ment. Just a shade more smoke from the funnels to indicate 
the firing of furnaces which had been lying cold, and the taking 
down or in of a few little port "comforts" like stove-pipes 
and gangways, forecasted imminent departure. 
The expression regarding the fleet, squadron, or even the 
