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The armoured trains from H.M.S. Suffolk, under the command of Captain Wolfe Murray, continued to fight along the Ufa front well into January, 1919. Only the intense cold and the necessity of recoupment and re-equipment caused them to retire to Omsk. The British Navy fighting on the Urals was the only reminder the Russian soldier had that the Allies of his country had not entirely deserted her.
The tasks allotted to the Battalion between October, 1914, and April, 1915, while garrisoning the Sudan were of great variety. With the gunners at Khartum Fort, they constituted part of the British force then in the country, of which Colonel Gresham was commander. The detachment left at Port Sudan organised its defences, ran an armoured train, and patrolled the Red Sea in the Enterprise.
Ranged along the coast from Folkestone to Deal was an armament consisting of forty-five battleships of the first, second, and third classes, supported by fifteen coast-defence ironclads, seventy armoured and thirty-two unarmoured cruisers, forty gunboats, and a hundred and fifty torpedo-boats.
A shell dropped upon the deck of the Spartiate, almost amidships. The pink flash blazed out between her two midship funnels. They crumpled up as if they had been made of brown paper. The six-inch armoured casemates on either side seemed to crumble away. The four-inch steel deck gaped and split as though it had been made of matchboard.
On October 12th, the day after the declaration of war, an armoured train conveying two 7-pounders for the Mafeking defences was derailed and captured by a Boer raiding party at Kraaipan, a place forty miles south of their destination. The enemy shelled the shattered train until after five hours Captain Nesbitt, who was in command, and his men, some twenty in number, surrendered.
It was understood that, so long there was no disorder, the authorities would make no move. But, by Saturday, all emergency plans were complete: the Fort garrison strengthened; cavalry and armoured cars told off to be available. Roy had no notion of being a mere onlooker, if things happened; and he felt sure they would.
Then below, into a compartment between the side of the ship and the armoured barbette which protects the delicate machinery for feeding shells and powder from the magazine deep below the water to the guns. "H was killed here. Impact of the shell passing through the outer plates burst it inside; and, of course, the fragments struck harmlessly against the barbette."
There must have been, everybody said, something serious under the rumours of a threatened attack from across the Rio Grande, otherwise government would not be sending troops to reinforce the large garrison at Fort Bliss, or be offering to take women and children away from the river towns, in armoured trains if desired.
The navigating bridge vanished; the twelve-inch armoured conning-tower cracked like an eggshell; the barbette collapsed like the crust of a loaf, and the big 9.2 gun lurched backwards and lay with its muzzle staring helplessly at the clouds.
“Meantime the Oregon and the Brooklyn, as they were stretching away toward the coast, had opened fire also, and then the last of the big Spaniards, the Infanta Maria Teresa, having rounded the point, the magnificent spectacle of a squadron battle on the open sea—of a battle between four of the best modern armed cruisers on the Spanish side, against three battle-ships and an armoured cruiser on our side—was spread out to view.
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