A Game of Wits
While half-naked men in ships’ turrets and half-naked men at coast guns and in mortar pits were toiling to wreak brute destruction, a game of wits was being played just as busily. This game was played, not on the huge armored ships, not in the formidable engine-batteries of the forts, but in places miles away from either.
They were insignificant little places from the point of view of war—summer settlements on friendly beaches, harmless little coves, pleasant shores beset with the fantastic hotels and fantastic towers of American pleasure-places. In the summer days of peace, probably not one in any thousand of the happy crowds that played and laughed there ever imagined that these serene, careless places could have any importance some day in battle.
That night they were playing a part that was full of danger to the venturesome ships. The American engineers had established portable search-lights there, and made base stations and range-finding points of them. Every one of these insignificant out-lying points was endowing the guns in the distant defenses with an added deadliness of accuracy.
The modern rifled gun is fired not by sight but by mathematics. The position of its target is found not by guess but by triangulation. Far away, on either side of land batteries are observers. The straight line from one to the other is the base line. As soon as they sight a ship, each turns his instruments on it and gets the angle from his end of the base line. The ship to be fired at is at the apex of the triangle thus obtained.
The men at the guns get this position by telephone instantly. They know to a foot what their weapons’ elevation must be with a given charge of powder and a given weight of projectile to reach that distant spot. They set their mammoth piece, elevate it above the parapet on its lift, fire it and bring it back into concealment again.
To bombard these base-stations from the sea was nearly futile. The shells that could sweep a fore-shore and make it untenable for an army might never find these few scattered, concealed men or these scattered, hidden, tiny stations. A whole fleet might rave at them for hours, and in vain. There was only one sure, quick way to cripple them.[97]