en heard officers say on board our own ships. But that
was hypothesis. Here was demonstration, which made a glimpse of
the Lion and the Tiger so interesting. The Lion had had a narrow
escape from going down after being hit in the feed tank; but once in
dry dock, all her damaged parts had been renewed. Particularly it
required imagination to realize that this tower had ever been struck;
visually more convincing was a plate elsewhere which had been left
unpainted, showing a spatter of dents from shell-fragments.

"We thought that we ought to have something to prove that we had
been in battle," said the host. "I think I've shown all the hits. There
were not many."

Having seen the results of German gun-fire, we were next to see the
methods of British gun-fire; something of the guns and the men who
did things to the Germans. I stooped under the overhang of the turret
armour from the barbette and climbed up through an opening which
allowed no spare room for the generously built, and out of the dim
light appeared the glint of the massive steel breech block and gun,
set in its heavy recoil mountings with roots of steel supports sunk into
the very structure of the ship. It was like other guns of the latest
improved type; but it had been in action, and you kept thinking of this
fact which gave it a sort of majestic prestige. You wished that it might
look a little different from the others, as the right of a veteran.

As the plugman swung the breech open I had in mind a giant
plugman on the U.S.S. Connecticut whom I used to watch at drills
and target practice. Shall I ever forget the flash in his eye if there
were a fraction of a second's delay in the firing after the breech had
gone home! The way in which he made that enormous block obey his
touch in oily obsequiousness suggested the apotheosis of the whole
business of naval war. I don't know whether the plugman of H.M.S.
Lion or the plugman of the U.S.S. Connecticut was the better. It would
take a superman to improve on either.

Like the block, it seemed as if the man knew only the movements of
the drill; as if he had been bred and his muscles formed for that. You
could conceive of him as playing diavolo with that breech. He
belonged to the finest part of all the machinery, the human element,
which made the parts of a steel machine play together in a beautiful
harmony.

The plugman's is the most showy part; others playing equally
important parts are in the cavern below th