THE COMPLETE MILITARY WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING. Rudyard 1865-1936 Kipling
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charge of the guns, and they speculate at large and carelessly. We (I speak for our cruiser) are not addicted to swear in the words of the torpedo Lieutenant because we do not carry those fittings; but we do all devoutly believe that it is the business of a cruiser to shoot much and often (see Note III). What follows is, of course, nonsense—the merest idle chaff of equals over cigarettes; but rightly read it has its significance.
‘The first thing to do,’ says authority aged Twenty-One, ‘is to be knocked silly by concussion in the conning-tower. Then you revive when all the other chaps are dead, and win a victory off your own bat—à la illustrated papers. ’Wake up in Haslar a month later with your girl swabbing your forehead and telling you you’ve wiped out the whole Fleet.’
‘Catch me in the conning-tower! Not much!’ says Twenty-Three. ‘Those bow-guns of yours will stop every shot that misses it; an’ the upper bridge will come down on you in three minutes.’
‘Don’t see that you’re any better off in the waist. You’d get the funnels and ventilators and all the upper fanoodleums on top of you, anyhow,’ is the retort. ‘We’re a lot too full of wood, even with our boats out of the way.’
‘The poop’s good enough for me,’ says Twenty-Four (that is his station). ‘Fine, light airy place, and we can get our ammunition handier than you can forward.’
‘What’s the use of that?’ says he in charge of the bow guns. ‘You’ve got those beastly deck torpedo-tubes just under you. Fancy a Whitehead smitten on the nose by one little shell. You’d go up.’
‘So’d you. She’d blow the middle out of herself. If they took those tubes away we could have a couple more four-inchers there. There’d be heaps of room for their ammunition in the torpedo magazine.’
Guns and Torpedoes
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’ an 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.’
‘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.’
‘I wouldn’t if ours were submerged, but with these deck-tubes one never knows how they’ll take the water. That thing must have canted as it fell.’
The Gunner looks grieved to the quick, but is presently consoled by a few score pounds of guncotton, and goes off with grapnels and batteries to practise ‘sweeping’ and ‘creeping’ at the mouth of the bay with a few score other boats. They mine and countermine expeditiously in the Channel Fleet. The process is a technical one, and need not be described here, for there is no necessity to make public either the area covered with mines or the time that it took to lay them. The Gunner returned with a detailed account and some fish that had been stunned by concussion.
‘It was a nice little show,’ he said. ‘A very nice little show. Did you happen to see our smoke?’
I had seen one end of Bantry Bay ripped up from its foundations, but did not inquire farther.
‘Man and Arm Boats’
Many things are impressive and not a few terrifying in the Fleet, but the most impressive sight of all is the swift casting-forth from the trim black sides of the instruments and ministers of death. They vary hourly, according to the taste and fancy of the speller. A wisp of signals floats from the Flagship. Our little cruiser erupts—boils like a hive—and some one takes out a watch. There is a continuous low thunder of bare feet, a clatter, always subdued, of arms snatched from the racks, a creaking of falls and blocks, and the noise of iron doors opening and shutting. Of a sudden the decks stand empty; the Maxims have gone from the bulwarks, and the big cutters are away, pulling mightily for the Flagship. From each one of our twelve neighbours pour forth the silent crowded boats. They cluster round the Flag, are looked over, and return. They are not merely boats with men in them. They are fully provisioned; the larger ones have boat-guns, the smaller Maxims, with a proper allowance of ammunition