ew kind of concrete; and
those who claim to have been present on the occasion declare that within
forty-eight hours after they had mixed and molded it, it was ready to
bear the weight of the guns and withstand the shock of their recoil.

This having been done, I conceive of the operators as hoisting their
guns into position, and posting up a set of rules--even in time of war
it is impossible to imagine the Germans doing anything of importance
without a set of rules to go by--and working out the distance by
mathematics, and then turning loose their potential cataclysms upon the
stubborn forts which opposed their further progress. From the viewpoint
of the Germans the consequences to the foe must amply have justified the
trouble and the cost. For where a 42-centimeter shell falls it does more
than merely alter landscape; almost you might say it alters geography.

In the open field, where he must aim his gun with his own eye and
discharge it with his own finger, I take it the Kaiser's private soldier
is no great shakes as a marksman. The Germans themselves begrudgingly
admitted the French excelled them in the use of light artillery. There
was wonderment as well as reluctance in this concession. To them it
seemed well-nigh incredible that any nation should be their superiors in
any department pertaining to the practice of war. They could not bring
themselves fully to understand it. It remained as much a puzzle to them
as the unaccountable obstinacy of the English in refusing to be budged
out of their position by displays of cold steel, or to be shaken by the
volleying, bull-like roar of the German charging cry, which at first the
Germans counted upon as being almost as efficacious as the bayonet for
instilling a wholesome fear of the German war god into the souls of
their foes.

While giving the Frenchmen credit for knowing how to handle and serve
small field-pieces, the Germans nevertheless insisted that their
infantry fire or their skirmish fire was as deadly as that of the
Allies, or even deadlier. This I was not prepared to believe. I do not
think the German is a good rifle shot by instinct, as the American often
is, and in a lesser degree, perhaps, the Englishman is, too. But where
he can work the range out on paper, where he has to do with mechanics
instead of a shifting mark, where he can apply to the details of gun
firing the exact principles of arithmetic, I am pretty sure the German
is as good a gunner