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.

Beyond the Lion’s bow were more ships, and port and starboard and aft were still more ships.  The compass range filled the eye with the stately precision of the many squadrons and divisions of leviathans.  One could see all the fleet.  This seemed to be the scenic climax; but it was not, as we were to learn later when we should see the fleet go to sea.  Then we were to behold the mountains on the march.

You glanced back at the deck and around the bridge with a sort of relief.  The infinite was making you dizzy.  You wanted to be in touch with the finite again.  But it is the writer, not the practical, hardened seaman, who is affected in this way.  To the seaman, here was a battle-cruiser with her sister battle-cruisers astern, and there around her were Dreadnoughts of different types and pre-Dreadnoughts and cruisers and all manner of other craft which could fight each in its way, each representing so much speed and so much metal which could be thrown a certain distance.

“Homogeneity!” Another favourite word, I remember, from our own wardrooms.  Here it was applied in the large.  No experimental ships there, no freak variations of type, but each successive type as a unit of action.  Homogeneous, yes—­remorselessly homogeneous.  The British do not simply build some ships; they build a navy.  And of course the experts are not satisfied with it; if they were, the British navy would be in a bad way.  But a layman was; he was overwhelmed.