TERRORS OF THE SEA

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1683, 1 June 1904, Page 18

TERRORS OF THE SEA

BELOW THE WATER-LINE.

(By Frank T. Sullen. in tlie "‘Daily Mail”)

. When wondering landsfolk a little ■wiser than, tlie majority of their fellows • exercise their privilege' of visiting a modern man-of-war anchored in some harbour on the shores of which they are spending a holiday, it is instructive and amusing to listen to their comments upon what is shown them. But in a very short time, as wonder succeeds wonder, and the astonishing intricacies of the vast magazine of machinery endure their uninformed scru;iny, there comes upon, them a sense of utter, bewilderment, of inability to cope vith the inrush of new ideas, and the ■’-vell-intentioned but necessarily technical explanations tendered by their guides fall ■upon dulled ears and benumbed sensona. - So that the usual effect produced upon . • hem by sucir a visit is mainly limited / -,o a vision of massive entanglement and -wonderful cleanliness, coupled with a pleasant recollection of the courtesy shown them by. the -men with whom whey have come in contact. Now, between the spectacle presented by a battleship in commission quietly .reposing in some harbour ready to receive visitors and the same vessel at sea there is a difference that is only to be called immense. Yet between the ship steadily holding her course for some objective under peace conditions, and herself prepared for battle, there is an oven greater contrast, awe-inspiring even to the initiated, but) in the nature of things never revealed to any but naval men, and, they, being doers of the most energetic kind, are not apt to _ tell the wonderful story, at any rate in terms to be understanded of the people. Therefore it falls to the lot of a mere outsider ■ to essay the task. Perhaps the most noticeable feature of ■ ; the internal economy of a battleship at sea in time of peace is its regularity, allied to extreme, mobility. - There is absolutely nothing mechanical about the operations of the crew as there is about .the drill of soldiers; all things " ■ are done in a flexible way. that suggests a large margin, in case of such sudden emergency as may always be expected at sea, In our service a large—far too large, some think—amount of time and labour is spent in making the aggregation of mechanical appliances above and below look like a jeweller’s shop window, b but that mistake is rapidly being amended. For it is not a question of cleanliness, the indispensability of which goes without saying, but a question of wasting time which should be used to much better'account. The domestic arrangements of tlie 800 men who man this huge vessel go on side by side with their professional duties in such <£.ll easy and interchangeable manner, and to the running accompaniment of . so much goodhumoured banter and fun that it is not easy to say where one ends and the other begins. Also, it is not a little amazing •I to .members of any other service than the - Navy to see how iron discipline apparently goes, hand in hand with large liberty, one melting into the other almost imperceptibly, yet to the minds of the men affected as clearly defined one •from the other .as black from white. It is, however, in the regions below the water-line, the engine-room and the stokeholds, where the difference between naval sea and harbour service is most strongly defined. From a quiescent mass of machinery, almost dazzling in its bright array, but looking to the unstructed eye like some vast infernal machine, replete with potentialities of destruction, yet terrible in its abnormal Bggjet, it has become alive, a thing of sSipendousi energy, with innumerable ramifications, and a whole chorus of different voices. And all around it. there is an atmosphere of suppressed power, only just held in control by its masters, a sense of itsi almost overwhelming desire to escape from its bondage and destroy everything about it. Apparently in the midst of the welter of glancing crank-throws, groaning pistons,- spurting steam, and spraying oil move unconcernedly the men attending upon these harnessed Titans. Why they are not severally and mariy limes slain each minute is not clear, nor can the mind feel much wonder at their escape, being taken up with a consideration of the hopelessness of emerging . from that terrible engine-rooin by those labyrinthine ladders in case of a sudden disaster to the flying machinery or an adventitious outburst of the imprisoned, superheated steam. But even this feel- ‘ ing is intensified upon passing through • the airlock into the stokeholds, where under' forced draught the half-naked, half-roasted stokers are feeding the devouring yet never satisfied furnace with a ceaseless stream of coal, hurled laboriously from far-off dim recesses to meet their unresting shovels. Very little in the way of danger experience can be learned by these men under war conditions; it is doubtful if they will hear the frightful din of the gun’s in time of action; only one fact must ever be plainly in their minds—that whoever may escape from tlie result of one well-directed shell in the vitals of the ship, they will not. . Brit any mind, save that of a naval man, must recoil from the spectacle of one of these monsters going into action against others almost equal to it in potentiality of destruction. There is something unspeakably devilish about the conditions of modern naval warfare. In the open battle-field even at such holocausts as Worth and Gravelotte, death -ieohito amid shoutings and open pageantry ik conflict-that make the sudden exit of souls from bodies less terrible to the mind than this close, breathless waiting' for destruction or opportunity , .to destroy. It bears to my mind much of the stamp of the Italian duel, where .. . two naked 'oes, each with his left arm lashed behif.-d him, arid; his right hand clutching a long, keen knife, a,re turned ■loose in a perfectly dark room, and locked , in to do one another to dentil. In i he first place, with the exception of •.; the handful of signalmen. of whom

glimpses will occasionally be caught as they manipulate semaphores conveying the admiral’s wishes or acknowledging them, there will be about the advancing monsters no sign of the men who handle them.

The actual directors of the vast machines will be shut in behind “ circular walls of steel, the head of each 6bip being in the centre of communication with every part of her, like the great ganglions of the body. Everything ornamental or obstructive to the awful duty about to be done is hidden or flung away; everything burnable or floatable about the decks, especially the boats,'cast into the sea. And the assemblage of leviathans, each apparently proceeding by her own volition and only breathing a thin film of hardly visible smoke, yet each preserving her exact relative position to her fellows in the line of battle, speed on towards the meeting which will be short but more ghastly in its swift horrors than any battles the world has yet seen.

Down beneath the water-line, where engineers and stokers are shut in to what appears hopeless destruction upon the advent of one shell the Titanic labour goes grimly. forward. A thousand details demand attention, and many are so fortunate as to have no leisure for meditation upon what is coming like the waiting groups gathered about the guns in turret and casemate above. But surely there cannot for one mo-* ment be absent from, the minds of any in that forlorn hope below the prescience of what will surely happen if or when amid that amazing complication of steam pipes, hydraulic pipes, compressed air pipes, voice tubes, electric cables, and ammunition hoists there bursts a shell. In spite of this knowledge, however, it is certain that such men will quietly and intelligently do their duty: all the more heroically because of their full acquaintance with the immediate probabilities of hideous forms of death awaiting those who go down to the sea in a battleship to war.