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 dug-out!" one exclaimed, from army habit.
"Precisely! No harm done next door."
Trench traverses and "funk-pit shelters" for localizing 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 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.
"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 Bluecher and on the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst in their last ghastly moments of bloody chaos.