Everyone held his breath and expected to see a trawler hit, directly.
There was a shout of "The _Triumph's_ started!" A yellowish cloud shot out from her, then another; they shot out all along her broadside, and, right in among the scrub, where the Turkish guns had been firing, burst her 7.5 lyddite shells.
Then splashes began falling close to the _Triumph_ herself--short--short--far over her--right under her stern. "Hit under the fore bridge!" someone shouted. The "Action" bugle blared out in the _Achates_; officers and men rushed to their stations; and the last thing Uncle Podger and the Lamp-post saw was the trawlers turning round and scuttling back, followed by columns of water leaping up close to them.
Uncle Podger, sedately excited, and the long, thin Lamp-post made their way along the mess deck, pushing through the crowds of men scurrying to and fro; guns' crews squeezing into the casemates and closing the armoured doors behind them; the stoker fire-parties bustling along with their hoses, and the lamp trimmers coming round and lighting the candle lanterns in case the electric light failed.
To get to the "transmitting-room", which was their station, they had to go down the ammunition hoist of "B2" casemate--the for'ard one on the port side of the main deck,--and so many men of the ammunition supply parties had to go down it that there was a squash of men squeezing through the casemate door.
"Early doors, sixpence extra," Uncle Podger grinned, as they waited whilst man after man climbed down the rope-ladder in the hoist. This hoist was simply a steel tube some fifteen feet long, big enough for a broad-shouldered man to crawl through, and the rope ladder dangled down inside it. When the bottom rung of the ladder was reached, there was a jump down of some five feet or so into the "fore cross passage"--a broad space, from side to side across the ship, under the dome of the armoured deck. The magazines were below this fore cross passage, and men standing in them handed up the six-inch cordite charges through open hatches.
Into this space ran the ammunition passages, running aft along each side under the slope of the armoured deck, with the boiler-room bulkheads on the inner sides, and the bulkheads of the lower wing bunkers on the outer. When, as was now the case, the shells in their red canvas bags hung in rows along both these bulkheads, there was precious little room for two people to pass side by side.