“Junk, of course,” was how he expressed the result. Here, too, a man stepped forward to take the place of the man who was killed, just as the first lieutenant takes the place of a captain of infantry who falls. With the whole telephone apparatus blown off the wall, as it were, how did he communicate?
“There!” The host pointed toward an opening at his feet. If that failed there was still another way. In the final alternative, each turret could go on firing by itself. So the Germans must have done on the Blücher and on the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst in their last ghastly moments of bloody chaos.
“If this is carried away and then that is, why, then, we have—” as one had often heard officers say on board our own ships. But that was hypothesis. Here was demonstration, which made a glimpse of the Lion and the Tiger so interesting. The Lion had had a narrow escape from going down after being hit in the feed tank; but once in dry dock, all her damaged parts had been renewed. Particularly it required imagination to realise that this tower had ever been struck; visually, more convincing was a plate elsewhere which had been left unpainted, showing a spatter of dents from shell-fragments.
“We thought that we ought to have something to prove that we had been in battle,” said the host. “I think I’ve shown all the hits. There were not many.”
Having seen the results of German gun-fire, we were next to see the methods of British gun-fire; something of the guns and the men who did things to the Germans. One stooped under the overhang of the turret armour from the barbette and climbed up through an opening which allowed no spare room for the generously built, and out of the dim light appeared the glint of the massive steel breech block and gun, set in its heavy recoil mountings with roots of steel supports sunk into the very structure of the ship. It was like other guns of the latest improved type; but it had been in action, and one kept thinking of this fact that gave it a sort of majestic prestige. One wished that it might look a little different from the others, as the right of a veteran.
As the plugman swung the breech open I had in mind a giant plugman on the U. S. S. Connecticut whom I used to watch at drills and target practice. Shall I ever forget the flash in his eye if there were a fraction of a second’s delay in the firing after the breech had gone home! The way in which he made that enormous block obey his touch in oily obsequiousness suggested the apotheosis of the whole business of naval war. I don’t know whether the plugman of H. M. S. Lion or the plugman of the U. S. S. Connecticut was the better. It would take a superman to improve on either.
Like the block, it seemed as if the man knew only the movements of the drill; as if he had been bred and his muscles formed for that. One could conceive of him playing diavolo with that breech. He belonged to the finest part of all the machinery, the human element, which made the parts of a steel machine play together in a beautiful harmony.
The plugman’s is the most showy part; others playing equally important parts are in the cavern below the turret; and most important of all is that of the man who keeps the gun on the target, whose true right eye may send twenty-five thousand tons of battleship to perdition. No one eye of any enlisted man can be as important as the gun-pointer’s. His the eye and the nerve trained as finely as the plugman’s muscles. He does nothing else, thinks of nothing else. In common with painters and poets, gun-pointers are born with a gift, and that gift is trained and trained and trained. It seems simple to keep right on, but it is not. Try twenty men in the most rudimentary test and you will find that it is not; then think of the nerve it takes to keep right on in battle, with your ship shaken by the enemy’s hits.
How long had the plugman been on his job? Six years. And the gun-pointer? Seven. Twelve years is the term of enlistment in the British navy. Not too fast but thoroughly, is the British way. The idea is to make a plugman or a gun-pointer the same kind of expert as a master artisan in any other walk of life, by long service and selection.
None of all these men serving the two guns from the depths to the turret saw anything of the battle, except the gun-pointer. It was easier for them than for him to be letter-perfect in the test, as he had to guard against the exhilaration of having an enemy’s ship instead of a cloth target under his eye. Super-drilled he was to that eventuality; super-drilled all the others through the years, till each one knew his part as well as one knows how to turn the key in the lock of his bureau. Used to the shock of the discharges of their own guns at battle practice, many of the crew did not even know that their ship was hit, so preoccupied was each with his own duty, which was to go on with it until an order or a shell’s havoc stopped him. Every mind was closed except to the thing which had been so established by drill in his nature that he did it instinctively.