The charge is now home, the gun captain whisks the breech block into place, the primer is attached and then the captain slaps the pointer on the back or cries ready. All this time the gun is being trained, the range and deflection have been changed, and instantly there is a roar, a blinding flash. The members of the crew close to the gun move just far enough back to escape the recoil, like a prizefighter when he throws his head back and escapes a blow by the fraction of an inch.
Open comes the breech in a flash, then another charge on it by the various men, another slap on the back, another roar and it's a hit or a miss. Then a third charge, and another and another. The men sweat and breathe hard, their faces become strained and some of them white. The fight is on, and the work, second by second, every one of them as valuable as hours would be ordinarily, saps the strength and energy of the men in their supreme effort.
"Every shot a hit!" cries one of the crew exultingly.
"What was the time?" asks another.
"So many seconds," says the umpire.
"That beats all records!" shouts another, and then there are cheers and great rejoicing. After the first fire scarcely a man hears the noise of the gun. It is a mere pop to them. Sometimes they overreach themselves in the desire to be quick and they make a miss. They don't hear the last of that for some time, but it's all in the work and part of the general eagerness to do well.
Then come the 8-inch guns. The rumble and roar is only a little worse than the 7-inch guns. The geysers shoot a little higher and the echoes from the report come back to the ship like so many sharp thunderclaps, where the lightning is close. Indeed, if you want to have a better reproduction of thunder than any theatre can produce just manage to be on a battleship while it fires off its 8-inch guns in rapid succession. It's the kind of thunder that comes when lightning hits and you look out to see if the tree in your front yard has been split. Crash after crash comes back to make you duck and dodge until the projectile has finished its thunderbolt career and darts into the water with perhaps the ignominious mission of killing a fish instead of shattering a battleship.
But the 12-inch guns! Pack the cotton well into your ears! Keep your mouth open! Stand as far away from the muzzle as you can on the ship! Secure all the things in your stateroom, for if you don't you may find your shaving mug on the floor and your hairbrush mixed up with the fragments of your soap dish! Close your port or else your trinkets may be whisked into a heap and some of them broken into pieces! The whistle has blown. The seconds go by, oh how slowly! Will they never get that gun loaded? Then comes a blast. The white flame seems brighter than sunlight, the roar runs through you like an electric shock, the decks seem to sink and you wonder if the eruption of Mont Pelée had more force than that. You look toward the target. There goes the projectile, straight through the bullseye. Then an enormous geyser leaps into the air more than a hundred feet high. Surely that is Old Faithful! Then comes another half a mile away. Then another and another and you wonder if the projectile is going clear over to Europe.
And with this comes that peculiar roar that no other agent of power produces. It is more like the rush of a limited express into and out of the mouth of a tunnel. You can hear the chug, chug of the locomotive. You hear the rumble of a fast train on a still night through a valley. You can almost see the hills and the little river as the train dashes over bridges and noisy trestles. There it goes into the tunnel again, and before you can speak of it out it comes with another roar! More bridges and trestles, more tunnels, more chugs, and then there comes a steady roar. The train is going over the hill and out of the last tunnel, and you take a long breath. Before you expel it from your lungs there is another smiting flash and you are dancing on your toes again. The ship seems to settle and you get the geysers, the roar of the fastest train that ever ran. And so it goes until the whistle blows and you swing around to look at the target and then repeat the performance. You now begin to realize what a battleship means, and you are speculating about it when an officer comes around and says:
"Pretty fine, eh? Well, that's nothing to battle practice! when for a certain number of minutes we let all the guns go together. That's real noise! This is just pop-gun work."