rgets resemble
grease-spots on the oil-cloth doesn't take up but a bit of the time of
the men who constitute the crew. They have to know a lot about moving
the big fellow, raising him and lowering him, anchoring him so he won't
right-step and left-step when he's supposed to be firing, cleaning him
up for inspection and the like.

About seventy per cent. of them learned a good deal about the firing end
back in the Coast Artillery Corps in the States, but this business of
riding a big gun on a railroad bed, and so forth, was new to a good many
of them until recently. Now, they say, the minute the aero observer up
above gives them range and so forth, they are ready to go ahead and
batter the eternal daylights out of anything from the Kaiserschloss down
to old Hindenburg himself.

Besides the big guns that hurl a whole hardware shop-ful of steel at the
enemy, there are long-barreled 155s, and deadly devices they are in
their way, too. But it is about the big babies, the instruments which,
more than any other save the aeroplanes, typify for most of us the
advanced methods of modern warfare, that most of the attention is
centered. The 155s and the other smaller bores can be pulled up to
within striking distance of the line by trucks and caterpillar tractors,
but the heftiest never leave the railroad flat cars on which they are
built. In other words, they are rolling stock destined to keep a rolling
and a rolling and a rolling until they roll right on into Germany.

Getting One Ready to Fire.

It takes several hours to get a big one ready for firing but once its
mechanism is started, under the capable handling of a trained crew, it
works with the prettiness and precision of an engine. First the gun
rolls forward on to an arrangement of curved tracks which are called
"epies," and whose tips point toward the objective. Then, to steady the
piece, twelve large wooden feet are dropped by hydraulic jacks against
the rails, and the gun is ready to fire.

It fires, all right, sending a good ton of steel in the direction
indicated by the aerial observer. When it recoils, the flat car and all
slides back a good couple of yards on the rails. Then it is brought back
into position again, the barrel is cooled by jets of water, the wooden
feet are braced again, and the piece loaded. Even with all those
operations, the big fellow can fire a good forty shots a minute.

But, though they can fire those forty per minute