hangars and a
cheerful, chatty, hospitable group of the most famous aviators in the
German army--lean, keen young men all of them--and a sample specimen of
the radish-shaped bomb which these gentlemen carry aloft with the intent
of dropping it upon their enemies when occasion shall offer. Each of us
in turn solemnly hefted the bomb to feel its weight. I should guess it
weighed thirty pounds--say, ten pounds for the case and twenty pounds
for its load of fearsome ingredients. Finally, yet foremost, we were
invited to inspect that thing which is the pride and the brag of this
particular arm of the German Army--a balloon-cannon, so called.

The balloon-gun of this size is--or was at the date when I saw it--an
exclusively German institution. I believe the Allies have balloon-guns
too, but theirs are smaller, according to what the Germans say. This
one was mounted on a squatty half-turret at the tail end of an armored-
steel truck. It had a mechanism as daintily adjusted as a lady's watch
and much more accurate, and when being towed by its attendant
automobile, which has harnessed within it the power of a hundred and odd
draft horses, it has been known to cover sixty English miles in an hour,
for all that its weight is that of very many loaded vans.

The person in authority here was a youthful and blithe lieutenant--an
Iron Cross man--with pale, shallow blue eyes and a head of bright blond
hair. He spun one small wheel to show how his pet's steel nose might be
elevated almost straight upward; then turned another to show how the gun
might be swung, as on a pivot, this way and that to command the range of
the entire horizon, and he concluded the performance, with the aid of
several husky lads in begrimed gray, by going through the pantomime of
loading with a long yellow five-inch shell from the magazine behind him,
and pretending to fire, meanwhile explaining that he could send one shot
aloft every six seconds and with each shot reach a maximum altitude of
between seven and eight thousand feet. Altogether it was a very pretty
sight to see and most edifying. Likewise it took on an added interest
when we learned that the blue-eyed youth and his brother of a twin
balloon-cannon at the front of Laon had during the preceding three weeks
brought down four of the enemy's airmen, and were exceedingly hopeful of
fattening their joint average before the present week had ended.

After that we took photographs ad lib and McCutch