A BATTLESHIP IN ACTION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLI, Issue 12663, 17 September 1904, Page 2 (Supplement)

A BATTLESHIP IN ACTION.

A writer in the current, Overland Monthly gives a very vivid account of a battleship in action. The enemy have been sighted at a distance of 7000 yards, and they are waiting for the first shot. A petty- officer stands by with his ear pressed to the telephone which communicates with the conning tower. "you mat fire!" It is a matter of minutes now, but every second seems an interminable interval. ■ The gunners crouch like panthers. They watch the officer's face as if life and death lay .'hidden in it. The man with his eye along the gun seems hardly to breathe. Then down through the telephone there comes a small, faint voice. " Fire when you are ready!" it says. The officer turns about, "If you can bear on the enemy you may fire!" he says. The gunner leaps back with a cry. An electric button is touched, and a great rumbling roar goes through the ship. Nearly half a ton of metal has gone out with a force that would lift two battleships a foot out of the water at a hundred yards. THE HELL BELOW. It is a scene of terrible excitement on deck, but down below it is a veritable hell. A big shell strikes, but the men below can feel only the shock; they cannot tell the result. • Down to them comes an under-pressure, which grows hot and foul. Bat there is not an instant's rest. Petty-officers quicken their steps, and they know that they are fighting a great part of the battle. No guns must be idle. It may bo that just now is the critical moment, when every shot counts for victory or defeat. There comes a moment when the ammunition hoist from one of the turrets does not come down. The men below know only too well that it does not come down because the turret lias been destroyed. But there is a worse hell than this; it is the inferno in which the engineers and their assistants are playing their part. Here the air is even more hot and stifling. These men are shut off from all the rest of the ship. Great steel walls imprison them. And all this is to make the fires glow hotter. The engines strain like racehorses. The boilers are ■at their utmost tension. For the great ship must be able to move swiftly in a fight, to answer every touch of the wheel without an instants hesitation. To this place come no sounds of the battle. The rumble and crash of the big guns and the shocks of the enemy's shells are drowned in the roar of the boilers and fires and the thunder of the engines. " I wonder if they're fighting yet," shrieks an engineer to an assistant. And even as he speaks the battleship may be already almost a complete wreck. Now the battleship, even if she does not quickly sink, is hopelessly disabled and at the mercy of the enemy. She lists, and falls in the trough of the sea. It may be that she goes down. If so, there is little hope of escape for her crew, for she may go so suddenly that mon will be still at work in their turrets when the water closes over them. But if a shell enters one of the magazines the ship's fate is even more terrible— fate experienced by the American man-of-war, the Maine.