‘And what ’ud we do afterwards, please?’
‘Ah, that’s our strong point. What happened when that collier drifted down on us at Milford? It only improved our steaming power, didn’t it? We’re a regular honeycomb of compartments forward. I believe you could swipe off twenty foot of her forward, and she’d get home somehow,’ says an expert, enthusiastically.
‘Bit risky,’ says Twenty-One. ‘That ship you talked of is awfully plated up topside, but all her underpinnings are pretty weak. If you could lob in a few shell under some of those forward sponsons of hers, I believe she’d crumple up with the weight of her own guns. But (sorrowfully) you’d need a nine point two to do that properly.’
‘Beak her! Beak her! Catch her in a gale, coming out of harbour’ (the speaker named the very port). ‘It takes their people a week to get their tummies straight.’
‘Yes, but they never come out of harbour. At least they didn’t in the old days. And if they do, we sha’n’t be allowed a look-in. We shall be used for scouting—coaling all day and steaming all night. But we want those deck-tubes taken out all the same.’
‘I’d like target-practice every week,’ says another. ‘Say four times our present allowance of practice-ammunition. It ’ud wear the guns out, but it ’ud pay.’
And so the talk goes on; varying with each ship. Some of them are all for torpedoes, and have submarine vaults the size of a small church devoted to this game; but we, being what we are, are mainly for guns, and the Gunner who is in charge of the torpedoes has a hard time of it when he runs his quarterly trials.
‘A beautiful thing,’ says he, as the silver-coloured devil flops from the tube and tears away towards the mark. . . . ‘Well, I’m blowed.’ The torpedo has sheered away to the left, and now is poisoning the air with its garlic-scented Holmes light, fifty yards from the target.
‘What did I tell you?’ says some one sotto voce. ‘We could have got in a dozen shots from the four inch while you were touching off that boomerang.’
‘They’d hang you on the —— if you laughed at torpedoes.’