Somewhat is said in my “Memories” of the unmistakable astoundingness of huge bursting charges in the shell of big guns. (I should be sorry to limit the effects to even Geometrical Progression!) I don’t think Science has as yet more than mathematically investigated the amazing quality of Detonation. Here is a picture (see opposite [p. 176]) of only eighteen inch gun shells, such as the Battle Cruiser “Furious” was designed and built to fire. Her guns with their enormous shells were built to make it impossible for the Germans to prevent the Russian Millions from landing on the Pomeranian Coast! In this connection I append a rough sketch by Oscar Parkes of a twenty-inch gun ship (see [opposite]). The sketch will offend the critical eye of my very talented friend, Sir Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, but it’s good enough for shoregoing people to give them the idea of what, but for the prodigious development of Air-craft, would have been as great a New Departure as was the “Dreadnought.” The shells of the “Incomparable” fired from her twenty-inch guns would each have weighed over two tons! Imagine two tons being hurled by each of these guns to a height above the summit of the Matterhorn, or any other mountain you like to take, and bursting on its reaching the ground far out of human sight, but yet with exact accuracy as to where it should fall, causing in its explosion a crater somewhat like that of Vesuvius or Mount Etna, and consequently you can then easily imagine the German Army fleeing for its life from Pomerania to Berlin. The “Furious” (and all her breed) was not built for Salvoes! They were built for Berlin, and that’s why they drew so little water and were built so fragile, so as to weigh as little as possible, and so go faster.
It is very silly indeed to build vessels of War so strong as to last a hundred years. They are obsolete in less than ten years. But the Navy is just one mass of Tories! In the old days a Sailing Line of Battleship never became obsolete; the winds of Heaven remained as in the days of Noah. I staggered one Old Admiral by telling him that it blew twice as hard now as when he was at sea; he couldn’t go head-to-wind in his day with sails only, now with the wind forty miles against you you can go forty miles dead against it, and therefore the wind is equal to eighty miles an hour. He didn’t quite take it in. I heard one First Sea Lord say to the Second Sea Lord, when scandalised at seeing in a new ship a bathroom for the midshipmen, that he never washed when he went to sea and he didn’t see why the midshipmen should now! But what most upset him was that the seat of the water-closet was mahogany French-polished, instead of good old oak holystoned every morning and so always nice and damp to sit on. (Another improvement is unmentionable!)
I must not leave this chapter without expressing my unbounded delight in having to do business with so splendid a man as Major A. G. Hadcock, the Head of the Ordnance Department at the Elswick Works, who fought out single-handed all the difficulties connected with the inception of the eighteen-inch and the twenty-inch guns of the “Furious” and “Incomparable.” I have another friend of the same calibre, who has consistently been in the forefront of the Battle for the adoption of the biggest possible gun that could be constructed—Admiral Sir Sydney Eardley-Wilmot; he was also the most efficient Chief of the Munitions Department of the Admiralty. When I was gasping with Hadcock over a 20-inch gun, Wilmot had a 22-inch gun! I really felt small (quite unusual with me!). Now I hope no one is going to quote this line when they review this book:—“Some men grow great, others only swell.”
CHAPTER XIV
SOME PREDICTIONS
When I was “sore let and hindered” in the days of my youth as a young Lieutenant, a cordial hand was always held out to me by Commodore Goodenough. He was killed by the South Sea Islanders with a poisoned arrow. Being on intimate terms with him, I sent him, in 1868, a reasoned statement proving conclusively that masts and sails were damned as the motive power of warships.
(As a parenthesis I here insert the fact that so late as 1896 a distinguished Admiral, on full pay and in active employment, put forward a solemn declaration that unless sixteen sailing vessels were built for the instruction of the Officers and men of the Navy the fighting efficiency of the Fleet would go to the devil.)
Commodore Goodenough was so impressed by my memorandum that he had a multitude of copies printed and circulated, with the result that they were all burnt and I was damned, and I got a very good talking to by the First Sea Lord. I hadn’t the courage of those fine old boys—Bishops Latimer and Ridley—and ran away from the stake. Besides, I wanted to get on. I felt my day had not yet come. Years after, I commanded the “Inflexible,” still with masts and sails. She had every sort of wonderful contrivance in engines, electricity, etc.; but however well we did with them we were accorded no credit. The sails had as much effect upon her in a gale of wind as a fly would have on a hippopotamus in producing any movement. However, we shifted topsails in three minutes and a half and the Admiral wrote home to say the “Inflexible” was the best ship in the Fleet. Ultimately the masts and sails were taken out of her.
It was not till I was Director of Naval Ordnance that wooden boarding pikes were done away with. I had a good look round, at the time, to see if there were any bows and arrows left.
What my retrograde enemies perfectly detested was being called “the bow and arrow party.” When later they fought against me about speed being the first desideratum, the only way I bowled them over was by designating them as “the Snail and Tortoise party.” It was always the same lot. They wanted to put on so much armour to make themselves safe in battle that their ideal became like one of the Spithead Forts—it could hardly move, it had so much armour on. The great principle of fighting is simplicity, but the way a ship used to be built was that you put into her everybody’s fad and everybody’s gun, and she sank in the water so much through the weight of all these different fads that she became a tortoise! The greatest possible speed with the biggest practicable gun was, up to the time of aircraft, the acme of sea fighting. Now, there is only one word—“Submersible.”
But to proceed with another Prediction: