"Did one in five German shells hit at that range?" I asked.
"No!"
Or in ten? No! In twenty? Still no, though less decisively. You 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 Bluecher.
"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, this 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. An 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.
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! Finally, 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 kept 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.