We are blessed with a pair of deck torpedo-tubes, which weigh about ten tons, and are the bane of our lives. Our class is a compromise, and the contractors have generously put in a little bit of everything. But public opinion (except the Gunner) is unanimous in condemning those dangerous and hampering tubes.
‘Torpedoes are all rot on this class unless they’re submerged. Two more four-inchers ’ud be a lot better. They’re as handy as duck-guns. I say, did you see that last shrapnel of mine burst over the target? I laid it myself.’ Twenty-Three looks round for applause, but the other guns deride.
‘That’s all luck,’ says Twenty-One, irreverently.
‘Mine burst just beyond. It would have been dead right for an end-on shot. It would have snifted her just on the engine-room hatch. Sound place that. It mixes up the engines.’
‘Mahan says, somewhere, that broadside fighting is going to pay with our low freeboards, because most shots go wrong in elevation. Of course, broadside-on, a shell that misses you misses you clean. It don’t go hopping along your upper works as it would if you were end-on.’
‘Oh, I meant my shot for an end-on shot, of course,’ says Twenty-one; and some one promptly sits on him.
‘BEARING’ IN A GALE
‘No-o,’ says Twenty-Four, meditatively. ‘What we really want if we ever go into a row is weather—lots of it. Good old gales—regular smellers. Then we could run in and beak ’em while it’s thick. I believe in beaking.’ (That belief, by the way, is curiously general in the Navy.)
‘D’you mean to say you’d ram with a tea-tray like ours? I’m glad you aren’t the skipper,’ I interrupt.
‘Oh, he’d beak like a shot, if he saw his chance. Of course, he wouldn’t beak anything our size—it ’ud be cheaper to hammer her—but take the —— (he named a ship that does not fly Our flag). If you got in on her almost anywhere she’d turn turtle. And she cost about a million and a quarter. It’s just a question of L.S.D.’