From the decks of the _Invincible_, when the main action opened, little could be seen of the chase except columns of smoke, but from the fire control platform one could make out through glasses the funnels and most of the upper works of the German cruisers. At this elevation the sea horizon was distant 26,000 yards (about 15½ land miles), and upon the day of the Falkland Islands fight “visibility” was almost perfect. When an enemy ship can be seen, its distance can be measured within a margin of error of half of one per cent.—fifty yards in ten thousand; that is not difficult, but since both the enemy vessel and one’s own ship are moving very fast, and courses are being changed as the enemy seeks to evade one’s fire or to direct more efficiently his own guns, the varying ranges have to be kept, which is much more difficult. It follows that three operations have to be in progress simultaneously, of which one is a check upon and a correction of the other two. First, all the range-finders have to be kept going and their readings compared; secondly, the course and speed of one’s own ship have to be registered with the closest accuracy and the corresponding speeds and courses of the enemy observed and estimated; thirdly, the pitching of one’s shots has to be watched and their errors noted as closely as may be. All this delicate gunnery work is perfectly mechanical but chiefly human. The Germans, essentially a mechanically inhuman people, try to carry the aid of machinery farther than we do. They fit, for example, a gyroscopic arrangement which automatically fires the guns at a chosen moment in the roll of a ship. We fire as the roll brings the wires of the sighting telescopes upon the object aimed at, and can shoot better when a ship is rolling than when she is travelling upon an even keel. We believe in relying mainly upon the deft eyes and hands of our gun-layers—when the enemy is within their range of vision—and upon control officers up aloft when he is not. German gunnery can be very good, but it tends to fall to pieces under stress of battle. Ours tends to improve in action. Machinery is a good servant but a bad master. As the shots are fired they are observed by the spotting officers to fall too short or too far over, to one side or to the other, and corrections are made in direction and in range so as to convert a “bracket” into a “straddle” and then to bring off accurate hits.