The targets being prepared, the next thing done on every ship was to clear for action. All stanchions, boats, ridge ropes, chests, gangways, everything movable, were taken down and the decks stripped. Hatches were closed and the ship was stripped for fighting. Theoretically everything wooden and not absolutely necessary to the fighting of the ship was thrown overboard. Pictures were removed from bulkheads and crockery packed away so as to save breakage. So carefully was all this packing done on the Louisiana that all the breakage that occurred when the big guns were fired was one water pitcher in a stateroom under the forward bridge and one pane of glass in the bridge storm shield.
The articles that were removed were not really thrown overboard, but were moved to out of the way places and marked with a tag which read:
"Overboard."
These tags furnished about the only element of fun in the entire practice. A mischievous boy, who may have been too familiar with the ship's Angora goat—you know goats have a way of doing things to persons when the persons are leaning over sometimes, and do not expect anything unusual to happen—or who didn't like the way the goat refused to eat tin cans occasionally and also spurned a pot of nice fresh paint, tied one of the labels to Billy's horns. Billy thought it was a decoration and if he had been a jackass instead of a goat would have heehawed with the rest of the crowd.
Then there was a little rascal of a youngster who is always getting into trouble because of his pranks and all too often has to be summoned to the mast for his offences, where he gets regularly penalties of from five to ten hours extra duty and grins as soon as the Captain's back is turned. Something had to be done about him. A shipmate stole up behind him and fixed an overboard tag on his back. For hours he carried it about and was surprised to see that suddenly he had become popular, while the rest of the crew grinned and laughed and slapped their sides just as ordinary folks do on April fool day when a sedate man goes down the street with a rag pinned to his coat tail.
But why should they be nervous about the shooting?
Well, if for three months you had been working almost day and night in the practice of loading and firing guns, had been lifting, pushing, pulling things about to represent great and small projectiles and bags of powder, and if you had been drilling so as not to make a false step or move and had been getting up team work so as to do your work in the shortest possible time, where fractions of seconds count; if you had a gun crew or were a member of one where probably one-half of the men had never heard a big gun go off before and there was danger that you would go gun shy; if for weeks and weeks you had been told to do exactly this and that and never to do that and this, and a lot of other tremendously important things had been dinned into your ears, especially matters relating to safety, and you realized that some blunder of yours might endanger not only yourself and your mates, but the ship itself; if you recalled that the navy gives a prize to the best crew on the fleet for each kind of gun fired and there is also a ship's prize for the best work of these guns, and that if you did your work well and won out there would be from $20 to $60, or possibly more, for yourself and each of your mates; if you knew how one gun's crew bets it will beat its rival; if you knew how every man on every ship is intensely eager to get the naval trophy in shooting for his own ship, so that all hands can put on proper airs and say in a deprecating way: "Of course we were glad to get the trophy, but it was nothing, mere nothing; why, we could beat it all to pieces in a fight, but of course we don't want to brag;" if you could see these men working overtime of their own volition in the Morris tube training, the miniature target shooting that is practised daily on the ships—you'd begin to realize how a ship gets all wrought up over this target practice.
The Captain naturally wants his ship to come out first when you get down to the real business of a warship; the division officers want the ship to win and their own division to be first; the gun crews, with money at stake for them and with the great pride that Uncle Sam's sailormen have, down to the last man, to excel in any contest, are more eager, if that were possible, than the officers to get the shooting record. The result is that when the great day approaches every one is as much under a severe strain as a trained university football team approaching the great game of the season. Team work has been the aim of the drills. To pretend to be cool and utterly unconcerned is the little game of byplay that is going on.
As the day comes on you don't hear much levity about the ship. The time of the grouch is at hand. Why, even the officers can hardly be civil to one another, and as for the men they get saying things to one another in their disputes and heat and anxiety that would make a stranger think they were dangerously near an uprising. The ordnance officer loses all his friends and the division officers glare at him and one another as if each felt sorry that the earth in general and the ship in particular was encumbered with such pitiful specimens of humanity.
Now and then they get to telling one another what they think of things, not meaning a word of it, and sometimes a dispute goes clear up to the Captain for him to decide. He does decide it gravely, and perhaps when the disputants leave he turns away and smiles as he recalls that men are but children of larger growth, and after all he's glad to see these things come up because it shows how hard and earnestly every one is working and bending all his energies to be first. Be first! Be first! That's the thought of every one, and all these bickerings, sharp-tongued retorts, objections, suggestions, sullen looks—yes, even drawn faces—mean that every ounce of energy, of intensity that the men on the ship have is being expended in the task at hand.