Constructors have racked their brains over the subject of turrets in the old contest between gun-power and protection. Too much gun-power, too little armour! Too much armour, too little gun-power! Off the Virginia capes we have pounded antiquated battleships with shells as a test, with sheep inside the turrets to see if life could survive. But in the last analysis results depend on how good is your armour, how sound your machinery which rotates the turret. That shell did not go through bodily, only a fragment, which killed one man and wounded another. The turret would still rotate; the other gun remained in action and the one under the shell-burst was soon back in action. Very satisfactory to the naval constructors.
Up and down the all-but perpendicular steel ladders with their narrow steps, and through the winding passages below decks in those cities of steel, one followed his guide, receiving so much information and so many impressions that he was confused as to details between the two veterans, the Lion, which was hit fifteen times, and the Tiger, which was hit eight. Wherever you went every square inch of space and every bit of equipment seemed to serve some purpose.
A beautiful hit, indeed, was that into a small hooded aperture where an observer looked out from a turret. He was killed and another man took his place. Fresh armour and no sign of where the shot had struck. Then below, into a compartment between the side of the ship and the armoured barbette which protects the delicate machinery for feeding shells and powder from the magazine deep below the water to the guns.
“H—— was killed here. Impact of the shell passing through the outer plates burst it inside; and, of course, the fragments struck harmlessly against the barbette.”
“Bang in the dugout!” one exclaimed, from army habit.
“Precisely! No harm done next door.”
Trench traverses and “funk-pit shelters” for localising the effects of shell-bursts are the terrestrial expression of marine construction. No one shell happened to get many men either on the Lion or the Tiger. But the effect of the burst was felt in the passages, for the air-pressure is bound to be pronounced in enclosed spaces which allow of little room for the expansion of the gases.
Then up more ladders out of the electric light into the daylight, hugging a wall of armour whose thickness was revealed in the cut made for the small doorway which you were bidden to enter. Now you were in one of the brain-centres of the ship, where the action is directed. Through slits in that massive shelter of the hardest steel one had a narrow view. Above them on the white wall were silhouetted diagrams of the different types of German ships, which one found in all observing stations. They were the most popular form of mural decoration in the British navy.
Underneath the slits was a literal panoply of the brass fittings of speaking-tubes and levers and push-buttons, which would have puzzled even the “Hello, Central” girl. To look at them revealed nothing more than the eye saw; nothing more than the face of a watch reveals of the character of its works. There was no telling how they ran in duplicate below the water line or under the protection of armour to the guns and the engines.
“We got one in here, too. It was a good one!” said the host.