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These youngsters had been devoting themselves to target practice for months, and had developed a fine technique of range-finding and the various other tactics of Twentieth Century massed artillery, to which was added the scientific perfection of the rocket guns and an average mental alertness that would have put the artilleryman of the First World War to shame.
As the efficiency of the aeroplane increased, so anti-aircraft guns and range-finding were improved.
From the range-finding and plotting-stations come orders to the sight-setters, and in an instant there is a stupendous roar as every gun on the port side sends forth its steel messenger. Again and again comes the broadside, while the ocean for acres about the periscope boils with the steel rain. It is much too hot for the submarine which sinks so that the periscope is invisible.
I still see the bright tea-table in that corner of a ruined farm, where our young officers presently greeted us the General marking our maps to make clear where he had actually been the Captain of the battery springing up to show off his gramophone while the guns crashed at intervals close beside us, range-finding, probably, searching out a portion of the German line, under the direction of some hidden observer with his telephone.
They were fresh from a couple of months of range-finding, and they had been quenching a concentrated thirst by concentrated effort. Haw-Haw Langley looked them over, sighed with relief, and then instantly produced Durham and the brown papers. He paused in the midst of rolling his cigarette and offered them to the nearest fellow. "Smoke?" he asked.
To be sure, these were long, range-finding shots, and were not intended to pitch where they did, but it is not always safe to rely upon the accuracy of shrapnel fire, and I moved again. But it was of no use; the enemy's pom-pom suddenly began to bark, and played on the one spot which had seemed but a moment before to be safe.
Moreover, the customary movements for protection, such as the relief of outposts, were carried out with such extraordinary laxity and neglect that De Wet was soon able to acquaint himself with almost every detail of the defence. Even the emplacements of a field gun and a pom-pom were disclosed by shots casually fired for range-finding purposes.
Possibly there may have been in this firing more method than we imagine, the idea being to mislead us by a pretended engagement with some force on the other side of Bulwaan. Another rational theory is that the gunners were simply expending a little ammunition in practice at range-finding for their guidance in future eventualities.
The heat escaping into the little room was not the comparatively negligible heat of burning hydrogen, but the cosmic energy of matter in creation. Sime slammed the door. The radiated light was so intense that it stung even his hardened skin. Looking through the rear range-finding periscope, he saw that they were about twenty miles from the fort. They had ceased firing.
Henry's textbook of artillery, republished in 1588, the year of the Armada, contains very practical diagrams for finding the range at sea by means of the gunner's half circle yet we now think range-finding a very modern thing indeed.
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