dll 
MORE BRIEF CONSIDERATIONS 
ON 
COAST DEFENCE. 
BY 
LIEUT.-COL. D. O’CALLAGHAN, R.A. 
To many gropers in the dark, General Geary’s paper in the R.A.I. 
“Proceedings” of December last (No. 12, Vol. XXI.), must have come 
ag a boon anda blessing. People walking in darkness, of which the 
terrors are not only caused by the absence of light, but by its being 
thronged by grim spectres and fearsome bogies, invoked and invested 
with sinister power by those who hug themselves in the fond belief 
that the garrison gunner must, of necessity, be a scientist, and a 
mathematician of a very high order to boot. 
Here, in General Geary’s paper, is the whole art of Coast Defence, 
stripped of its verbiage, its calculations and its formule. A hostile 
critic would probably call the style of the article fragmentary—but so 
is that of the book of Proverbs, to say nothing of the later contribu- 
tions, in staccato treatment, of Mr. Martin Tupper. In the pithiness 
of the style—in the absence of redundant word making—lies the force 
-and the usefulness of the article. 
Generalties—and nearly all sets of conditions obtaining in Coast 
Defence conform to broad generalties—are grasped by a bold and 
masterly hand, their leading features dissected out, and a few simples 
prescribed to meet each case. An enemy’s vessel is looked upon by 
General Geary much in the light in which the younger Mr. Wemmick 
regarded a church. “Here,” he virtually says, ‘is a ship—let’s hit 
it.” He does not send for his book of confidential photographs that 
he may identify this vessel with that which the Coast Brigade signal- 
man has pronounced it to resemble, nor does he scan the description 
of the amount of plating carried by the supposed ship, nor divide 
it into squares and assign to each its own appointed projectile, 
carefully discriminating between the various thicknesses of metal 
covering these imaginary rectangles. He does not do this, partly 
because it may have occurred to the enterprising captain to disguise 
his ship as a North German Lloyd Liner, or as a steam trawler, 
according to size ; but mainly because the ship, should she wish to do 
so, would have passed far out of range and possibly out of sight, be- 
fore his dispositions for the proper distribution of fire, and his calcu- 
lations as to the chances of the various projectiles selecting their 
appropriate squares, were completed. No—this nicety in the choice 
10, you, XXII, 
