as may be found on the Continent of Europe to-day.
This may not apply to him at sea, for he has neither the sailor
traditions nor the inherited naval craftsmanship of the English; but
judging by what I have seen I am quite certain that with the solid earth
beneath him and a set of figures before him and an enemy out of sight of
him to be damaged he is in a class all by himself.

A German staff officer, who professed to have been present, told me that
at Manonvilla--so he spelled the name--a 42-centimeter gun was fired
one hundred and forty-seven times from a distance of 14,000 meters at a
fort measuring 600 meters in length by 400 meters in breadth--a very
small target, indeed, considering the range--and that investigation
after the capture of the fort showed not a single one of the one hundred
and forty-seven shots had been an outright miss. Some few, he said, hit
the walls or at the bases of the walls, but all the others, he claimed,
had bull's-eyed into the fort itself.

Subsequently, on subjecting this tale to the acid test of second thought
I was compelled to doubt what the staff officer had said. To begin
with, I didn't understand how a 42-centimeter gun could be fired one
hundred and forty-seven times without its wearing out, for I have often
heard that the larger the bore of your gun and the heavier the charge of
explosives which it carries, the shorter is its period of efficiency..
In the second place, it didn't seem possible after being hit one hundred
and forty-seven times with 42-centimeter bombs that enough of any fort
of whatsoever size would be left to permit of a tallying-up of separate
shots. Ten shots properly placed should have razed it; twenty more
should have blown its leveled remainder to powder and scattered the
powder.

Be the facts what they may with regard to this case of the fort of
Manonvilla--if that be its proper name--I am prepared to speak with the
assurance of an eyewitness concerning the effect of the German fire upon
the defenses of Maubeuge. What I saw at Liege I have described in a
previous chapter of this volume. What I saw at Maubeuge was even more
convincing testimony, had I needed it, that the Germans had a 42-
centimeter gun, and that, given certain favored conditions, they knew
how to handle it effectively.

We spent the better part of a day in two of the forts which were fondly
presumed to guard Maubeuge toward the north--Fort Des Sarts and Fort
Boussois; but Fort Des