When 400 pieces of artillery were playing on the rock at the same moment, Elliott returned the compliment with a shower of red-hot balls, bombs, and carcases, that filled the air, with little or no intermission. The Count d’Artois had hastened from Paris to witness a capitulation. He arrived in time to see the total destruction of the floating batteries and a large part of the combined fleet. Attempting a somewhat feeble joke, he wrote to France:—“_La batterie la plus effective était ma batterie de cuisine_.” Elliott’s cooking-apparatus and “roasted balls” beat it all to nothing. Red-hot shot has been entirely superseded in “civilised” warfare by shells. It was usually handled much in the same way that ordinary shot and shell is to-day. Each ball was carried by two men, having between them a strong iron frame, with a ring in the middle to hold it. There were two heavy wads, one dry and the other slightly damped, between the powder and ball. At the siege of Gibraltar, however, matters were managed in a much more rough-and-ready style. The shot was heated at furnaces and wheeled off to the guns in wheelbarrows lined with sand. [Illustration: THE SIEGE OF GIBRALTAR] The partial failure of the navy to co-operate successfully with the land-forces, so far as bombardment was concerned, during the Crimean war, has had much to do with the adoption of the costly ironclad floating fortresses, armed with enormously powerful guns, of the present day. The earliest form, indeed, was adopted during the above war, but not used to any great extent or advantage. The late Emperor of the French(15) saw that the coming necessity or necessary evil would be some form of strongly-armoured and protected floating battery that could cope with fortresses ashore, and this was the germ of the ironclad movement. The first batteries of this kind, used successfully at Kinburn, were otherwise unseaworthy and unmanageable, and were little more than heavily-plated and more or less covered barges.