It is night. It is a black night. The stars are viewless and the ocean
through which the great steel hull is rushing, with only a slight hiss
where the sharp cutwater parts the waves, is merely a part of the same
gloom. Aloft and on deck the battleship is a part of the night. Below
deck all is dark save perchance a thin, knife-like ray emanating from a
battle-lantern. The lookouts, straining their eyes into the black for
long, arduous stretches, are relieved and half-blind and dizzy they
grope along the deck to their hammocks, stumbling over the prostrate
forms of men sleeping beside the 5-inch guns, exchanging elbow thrusts
with those of the gun crews who are on watch.
The trip this far has been a constant succession of drills and
instruction in the art of submarine fighting--all to the tune of general
alarm and torpedo defense bells. And the while preparations for sighting
the enemy have never been minimized. They involved precautions not
dissimilar to those on board a destroyer or other patrol-vessel, but
were of course conducted on a vastly greater scale. As suggesting an
outline of measures of watchfulness, we may regard this battleship as
the centre of a pie, with special watches detailed to cover their given
slice of this pie. These slices are called water sectors, and each
sector, or slice, extends at a given angle from the course of the ship
out to the horizon. Of course as the vessel is constantly moving at a
rapid rate, the centre of the pie shifts, too.
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