90

87

thought sufficient to allow a simple deployment to be made quickly
and without confusion. Few will allow 300 feet, a scant ship's
length, to be enough interval, in any crisis, in line ahead. How will
you increase these intervals? By a gradual divergence, or oblique
from any one ship? That may be simple but is certainly not rapid
Would you venture to put all the helms over together ? Scarcely.
Whatever you might risk if caught in such a formation, you will not
seriously argue for it as thing to be purposed beforehand, or to be
done without great chance of confusion and accident.

It is pretty sure that if six hundred feet be too great an in-
terval, and I do not think it is, three hundred will be too small.
However a fleet that is fighting in retreat, with a fleet speed
equalling its enemy's, could observe close intervals and could open
them at will by any of the forward movements commonly used by
skirmishers.

Now if the line (abreast) can be maintained at intervals ei-
ther of 300 or of 600 feet, it cannot be said to be in itself lia-
ble to severance by cutting; while the quickness with which, when
drawn up with 600 feet interval, it can be changed into column,
while still out of range of the enemy's rams or torpedoes, preserves
a sufficient mobility.

Let us here digress for a moment andexamine, a little more
closely, this point, viz: How quickly the order in line can be
changed into column, and up to what point the full artillery fire
may be held on to without too great risk of being caught in a