When the men are thorough masters of this lifting drill, they have to go through the nerve-trying ordeal of performing it as though in actual practice. Escapes are run into the yard. Some of the old hands mount to the roof, and the embryo firemen are ordered to go aloft and save them from an awful death. That this is a very considerable feat, I think our photograph of the operation will amply demonstrate. To an old hand who has performed the operation amid all the exciting surroundings of an actual fire it is simple enough. He skips up the creaking, bending ladder, lightly tosses a twelve-stone colleague on his back, in the most unconcerned manner, and as blithely skips down again.
But although there is an element of very real danger in it to the beginner, yet he generally gets through it satisfactorily, though his progress is necessarily slow. It is in such drills that his sea training stands him in good stead.
NERVOUS WORK FOR RECRUITS—NEW FIREMEN RESCUING OLD FIREMEN.
However, the most nerve-trying work is the jumping-sheet drill. As our illustration shows, some eighteen or twenty men at a given order man the canvas jumping-sheet.
Beckets, or rope handles, are supplied all round the edge of the sheet. Each man holds one of these in either hand, and as the jumper alights in the centre of the canvas, all simultaneously give a little, and so break the force of the fall. The men are required to jump 20 feet from a parapet into the sheet. It is nervous work, both for the jumpers and those who catch them.
The instructor tells you that there is no danger. In fact a forty-foot jump into the sheet would be very unlikely to result in injury.
It is easy to listen to such statements, but it is another thing to stand on that narrow ledge and gaze contemplatively into the tiny sheet, twenty feet below.
Every possible method of saving life is the subject of a special set of drills, and all are constantly practised by all hands alike. They are designed to meet every possible contingency, and when lives are lost by fire it is generally attributable to delay in summoning the brigade.
