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18 big guns, forged and finished, lift resting for a while before their removal to the shipyards and the front. The gigantic things are almost beautiful in their sleek and shiny blue-black coats. Eight of their kind may protrude from the decks of a great battleship like the Queen Elizabeth, and, as the round breech of one of them is swung back, like the door of a safe, and you look down the shining and tapering barrel to the far-off mouth, it is easy to imagine that the grey waters of the North Sea are heaving beyond it, while the enemy ships are lying on the edge of the horizon, in their low visibility against a misty sky.

Nor is your spell broken, though the scene of your vision is changed, when you look up to the hundred-ton crane, wide as the Strand, that will soon lift these mammoth creatures into the cradles that will carry them away (and is now rolling over your head to the bell-like clangour of its swinging chains) and see above it, through the darkening air, for the day is