Hitting the enemy is, however, but half the battle. If the ship fired at is armoured the impact may be on a cuirass that the gun represented cannot get through, or an armour-piercing shot may hit a part where no armour exists, and so do next to no harm. When harm is done it is scored on the card of the ship hit on a scale corresponding to the actual damage that would be inflicted. In a very little while the player realizes that what will put one ship out of action will hardly hurt another. This in theory he has, of course, always known, but between knowing a thing and fully realizing it there is an enormous gap. He has been firing, perhaps, at the German Kaiser Friedrich and blown her to pieces almost with big shell. He shifts his fire to the Wittelsbach, hits her as often, and she comes on unhurt. These two ships have the same armament and the same weight of armour—it is merely differently disposed. That difference of disposition tells in naval war game as heavily as it would in actual war.
In this little piece of realism lies the fascination of the game. That it has extraordinary fascinations for some naval officers is beyond dispute. The Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, for instance, had all the furniture turned out of the big drawing-room at the Xenia Palace, St. Petersburg, in order to have set up a table large enough to allow huge fleets to be manœuvred, and he invited the inventor over to stay with him at St. Petersburg for a month in order to play against him. In a Russian lunatic asylum there is at this day a captain who actually went mad on the game and spends his existence in perpetual imaginary battles. In the British Navy there are dozens of young officers who think nothing of playing a game from half-past eight on to four in the morning, taking their chances of being able to find a shore-boat to take them back to their ships at that hour in the depth of winter. I have seen battles often in which the opposing sides would not speak to each other; indeed, when a regular "war" is being worked out this is the usual situation. It is being "real war in miniature" that produces this. The writer can vouch for the maddening effect in a battle of some apparently splendid scheme being ruined by a single "lucky shell" from the enemy. Too late one realizes that the best dispositions are not those that promise most, but those in which a lucky shot or two will not bring about failure.
Torpedoes, however, perhaps take first place as maddening irritants. In the game as now played in the British Navy, between each move screens are usually put up. The object of these is to prevent the enemy "answering" any change of formation more quickly than could be done in actual battle. Under cover of these screens torpedoes are fired—the firing method being to draw a pencil line following the bearing of the tube, firing not at the enemy, but at the spot on which he is expected to be when the torpedo reaches him. Torpedoes are slow things relatively. They can travel a thousand yards in a minute, but take three minutes to do two thousand yards, and six to go three thousand. Very nice calculation is, therefore, needed. At the expiration of the time—that is to say, anything from one to six moves after firing—if the torpedo line and any ship (friend or foe) coincide, the ship is torpedoed. Till then nothing has been said: the torpedo comes as a bolt from the blue.
The panic caused by the first torpedoes fired under this system was immense. Both fleets put about and rushed away from each other, never getting within torpedo range again. In the centre, between the fleet, lay the victim, which the umpire had notified as torpedoed. Not till the battle was over was it made known that the torpedoed vessel had been hit by a torpedo fired by one of her consorts, across the path of which she had unwittingly wandered!
The acme of horror in this direction is perhaps provided by submarines. Slow moving, they have more or less to take up their positions before the battle begins. It is not permitted me to describe exactly how they are worked. I may say, however, that they are manœuvred on a separate board, and work blindly enough; for all that the player of a submarine sees of the battlefield is what he can find reflected in a tiny mirror. He has, in fine, to guess a great deal as to the course and distance of the enemy from the spot corresponding to that on which he is supposed to be, which reproduces the conditions under which a periscope is used fairly accurately. If a submarine can get within a square (one hundred yards) of a ship, that ship is allowed torpedoed. Nothing is allowed for the chance of the boat being seen by the ship, the assumption being that these chances are too small to be worth consideration; at any rate, till such time as it is too late for the ship to do anything.
This looks like an easy time for the submarine, but it is not so comfortable in reality, because destroyers and picket-boats may be with the enemy. Should a destroyer at any time pass within a hundred yards of the submarine, it is exit submarine!
In the British Navy the official home of the naval war game is at Greenwich Naval College, where captains play it during the "war course." In the United States the War College is its home. Its real British head-quarters are at Portsmouth, where a voluntary society plays it twice a week. Admiral Sir John Hopkins is the president of this association, and Mr. Fred. T. Jane, the inventor, its secretary. Both naval and military officers are eligible for membership, and, as far as possible, junior officers only. At the "war course" tactics are the principal study, but at Portsmouth tactics play a minor part. "Tactics cannot be taught by naval war game, save in a very general way," is the dictum of the inventor. "The Portsmouth Naval War-Game Society exists for quite different objects. It aims chiefly at teaching the guns and armour of possible enemies; and for the rest tries to train officers to think out war problems, to train them to think things quickly, and to exhibit resource, to learn the value of all the vital side issues of war, such as international law or the keeping up of communications, and so forth. There is no such thing as the abstract right or wrong move in war; to do a more or less wrong thing at once may often be better than doing a better thing a little later. 'Act' is the motto that the society strives to inculcate."
It is, it will be seen, far removed from a "theory hot-bed." In pursuance of the plan the society's members are incessantly at war with each other. Advantage is taken of the rivalry that exists between ships in the Navy—and one ship's officers are usually pitted against those of another ship. At other times it is the Navy against the Army; and before now personal enemies have been pitted against each other.
"In cards and games you play for sport, but in war game you must 'play to win,'" is the principle inculcated.
To this end anything whatever may be claimed, subject, however, to the provision that, should the umpire consider any claim impossible or absurd, the maker of it gets a breakdown to his best ship as a reward.