The Lebanon Express

A Landlubber Surprised

Quickness of British Tars in Clearing a Battleship for Action.

At the words: "Clear for action" there is a commotion which a landsman might mistake for a panic, as men rush from point to point. A bluejacket, says the London Daily News, never walks when an order is given, but does everything at the double. Everyone knows his station, and goes to it by the quickest and shortest way. With a rapidity that seems wonderful, companion ladders, with their ponderous gangways, are unshipped and stowed away; railings around the low decks, fore and aft, are lowered; the ventilating cowls and chimney stacks disappear, to be replaced by covers flush with the deck; hatches are battened down, water-tight doors closed, and tackle rigged for hoisting ammunition from the magazine. Between decks everywhere something of the same kind is being done as quickly and as quietly, and then the men stand to their guns. When the bugles sound for firing to commence, the great barbette turntables revolve slowly, trained by unseen power, and the quick-firing guns in maindeck batteries are worked with surprising celerity by detachments of royal marine artillery.

At a prize shooting recently a detachment fired sixteen shots in three minutes from one of the repulse guns, scoring nine direct hits and planting all the other seven shots so close to the target that they would have riddled the hull of a very small ship. The seventeenth round was in this gun when the "cease fire" sounded, so that one gunner, who was loading, must have lifted seventeen hundred pounds in three minutes. This incident gives a vivid idea of the work that would have to be done in action by crews of these quick-firing guns, as well as of the smartness with which the "blue marines" set about their task. Fire discipline will be a potent factor in any future battle at sea, and there can be no better means of acquiring it than by such exercise as one has seen at general quarters during the manoeuvres.