e turret; and most important
of all is that of the man who keeps the gun on the target, whose true
right eye may send twenty-five thousand tons of battleship to
perdition. No one eye of any enlisted man can be as important as the
gun-layer's. His the eye and the nerve trained as finely as the
plugman's muscles. He does nothing else, thinks of nothing else. In
common with painters and poets, gun-layers are born with a gift, and
that gift is trained and trained and trained. It seems simple to keep
right on, but it is not. Try twenty men in the most rudimentary test and
you will find that it is not; then think of the nerve it takes to keep
right on in battle, with your ship shaken by the enemy's hit.

How long had the plugman been on his job? Six years. And the gun-
layer? Seven. Twelve years is the term of enlistment in the British
navy. Not too fast but thoroughly is the British way. The idea is to
make a plugman or a gun-layer the same kind of expert as a master
artisan in any other walk of life, by long service and selection.

None of all the men serving these guns from the depths to the turret
saw anything of the battle, except the gun-layer. It was easier for
them than for him to be letter-perfect in the test, as he had to guard
against the exhilaration of having an enemy's ship instead of a cloth
target under his eye. Super-drilled he was to that eventuality; super-
drilled all the others through the years, till each one knew his part as
well as one knows how to turn the key of a drawer in his desk. Used
to the shock of the discharges of their own guns at battle practice,
many of the crew did not even know that their ship was hit, so
preoccupied was each with his own duty and the need of going on
with it until an order or a shell's havoc stopped him. Every mind was
closed except to the thing which had been so established by drill in
his nature that he did it instinctively.

A few minutes later one was looking down from the upper bridge on
the top of this turret and the black-lined planking of the deck eighty-
five feet below, with the sweep of the firm lines of the sides
converging toward the bow on the background of the water. Suddenly
the ship seemed to have grown large, impressive; her structure had a
rocklike solidity. Her beauty was in her unadorned strength. One was
absorbing the majesty of a city from a cathedral tower after having
been it its thoroughfares and seen the detail of its throbbing industry.