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The British Dreadnought built in nineteen hundred and five has a draft of thirty-one feet six inches and a displacement of twenty-two thousand and two hundred tons. Later, vessels of the Dreadnought type have a normal draft of twenty-seven feet and a naval displacement of eighteen thousand and six hundred tons.
There are no trenches in the sea, but only graves. It is merciless to the vanquished, and the casualties in a beaten fleet are total losses; instead of prisoners, fugitives, and wounded, there is one vast list of drowned. Ships that are sunk do not return to the battle-line, and their loss takes long to repair. Years are required to build a Dreadnought, and years to make a seaman.
The animal was famous, but not in that name; he had, like most honest persons, an alias. How he achieved his victory is uncertain; one thing, however, is certain it must have been a startling surprise to Dreadnought to find himself in a race at all, and still more astonishing to find himself in front. "How many ran?" I asked. "Three, sir; two of 'em crack horses."
The news of the devastation and flood caused by this strange and terrible dreadnought of the air created the profoundest apprehension and caused the wildest rumours, for what had happened in Tunis was assumed as likely to occur in London, Paris, or New York.
There were scores of verses, for he worked the Dreadnought every mile of the way between Liverpool and New York as conscientiously as though he were on her deck, and the accordion pumped and the fiddle squeaked beside him. Tom Platt followed with something about "the rough and tough McGinn, who would pilot the vessel in."
Nicola Tesla and John Hays Hammond, Jr., worked out the idea, and Edison was to give the last touches; but as Edison is a German prisoner, they can't wait for him. They are going to try the thing on New Year's night against the German dreadnought Wilhelm II in Boston Harbour." "Blow up the Wilhelm II?" "Yes, but the Germans are warned in advance.
"Some kind fate must have given us adjoining rooms," laughed Dave, when he realized that the two doors stood side by side. As Darrin passed into his new quarters his first glance rested lovingly on the breech of a huge gun that pierced the armored side of the dreadnought. "That's great!" thought the young ensign, jubilantly.
While still in hospital I received an English paper, with illustrations of the launch of a Dreadnought. The doctor, a Dalmatian Slav, looked at them sadly. "Why do you do these things?" he asked. "You are forcing on war. You will ruin Austria. We admire everything English, except your Dreadnoughts. Each time you build one, we of the Triple Alliance are forced to build one too.
For some years there seems to have been a complete arrest of the British imagination in naval and military matters. That declining faculty, never a very active or well-exercised one, staggered up to the conception of a Dreadnought, and seems now to have sat down for good. Its reply to every demand upon it has been "more Dreadnoughts."
The largest guns ever placed on board ship were the Armstrong one- hundred-and-ten-ton guns of the English battleships, Sanspareil, Benbow and Victoria. They were sixteen and one-fourth inch calibre. The newest battleships of England, the Dreadnought and the Temeraire, are equipped with fourteen-inch guns, but they are not one- half so heavy as the old guns.
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