At eight or nine thousand yards one knew that the modern battleship could tear a target to pieces. But eighteen thousand—was accuracy possible at that distance?
“Did one in five German shells hit at that range?” I asked.
“No!”
Or in ten? No! In twenty? Still no, though less decisively. One got a conviction, then, that the day of holding your fire until you were close in enough for a large percentage of hits was past. Accuracy was still vital and decisive, but generic accuracy. At eighteen thousand yards all the factors which send a thousand or fifteen hundred or two thousand pounds of steel that long distance cannot be so gauged that each one will strike in exactly the same line when ten issue from the gun-muzzles in a broadside. But if one out of twenty is on at eighteen thousand yards, it may mean a turret out of action. Again, four or five might hit, or none. So, no risk of waiting may be taken, in face of the danger of a chance shot at long range. It was a chance shot which struck the Lion’s feed tank and disabled her and kept the cat squadron from doing to the other German cruisers what they had done to the Blücher.
“And the noise of it to you aloft, spotting the shots?” I suggested. “It must have been a lonely place in such a tornado.”
“Yes. Besides the crashing blasts from our own guns we had the screams of the shells that went over and the cataracts of water from those short sprinkling the ship with spray. But this was what one expected. Everything was what one expected, except that desire to catch the fragments. Naturally, one was too busy to think much of anything except the enemy’s ships—to learn where your shells were striking.”
“You could tell?”
“Yes, just as well and better than at target practice for the target was larger and solid. It was enthralling, that watching the flight of our shells toward their target.”
Where were the scars from the wounds? One looked for them on both the Lion and the Tiger. That armour patch on the sloping top of a turret might have escaped attention if it had not been pointed out. A shell struck there and a fair blow, too. And what happened inside? Was the turret gear put out of order?
To one who has lived in a wardroom a score of questions were on the tongue’s end. The turret is the basket which holds the precious eggs. A turret out of action means two guns out of action; a broken knuckle for the pugilist.