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And no question of missing: the Boodah stationary and huge; every shell told. But, the deluge over, that thunder-marred visage again looked grimly forth, a face new-risen from smallpox, an apparition, roof-houses gone, lighthouse tops, one of her great 19.5 inchers in fragments, in her casemates seventeen dead.
Each theatre has its outfit of signallers, wireless, etc., and I can either answer within five minutes, or send help, or rush myself upon the scene at 25 miles an hour with the Q.E.'s fifteen inchers in my pocket. Here there is no question of emergency, or enemy pressure, or of haste; so much we see plain enough with our own eyes.
They accepted our 6 inchers with a very good grace. Often one of our H.E. hundred pounders seemed to burst just where a field gun had been spotted: and before our triumphant smiles had time to disentangle themselves from our faces, the beggars would open again. But the 15-inch shrapnel, with its 10,000 bullets, was a much more serious projectile.
Memories of one or two obsolete six inchers at Ladysmith helped me to feel as Constantinople would feel when her rail and sea communications were cut and a rain of shell fell upon the penned-in populace from de Robeck's terrific batteries. Given a good wind that nest of iniquity would go up like Sodom and Gomorrah in a winding sheet of flame.
A thousand of them converged and rushed the redoubt at the head of the Kereves Dere. A few seconds later into it one! two!! three!!! fell from the clouds the Turkish six inchers. Where the redoubt had been a huge column of smoke arose as from the crater of a volcano. Then fast and furious the enemy guns opened on us. For the first time they showed their full force of fire.
I soon put myself on a more even footing by cutting off the small one and a half inch hooks I had been using and bending on two thick and long-shanked four inchers. These answered beautifully, as although the barbs caused me some trouble, their stout shanks afforded a good grip and leverage when extracting them from the hard and keen-toothed jaws of the struggling fish.
They were crowned with rows of white sandbags, interspersed with blue bundles that looked like army blankets or blue bed sticks filled with earth. There was not much stirring for the moment. Suddenly the guns woke up behind our line. The Canadian eighteens and five inchers took up the chorus. Back came half a dozen German forty pounder shells bursting in the field on my right.
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