42-CENTIMETRE GUN

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2458, 11 May 1915, Page 8

42-CENTIMETRE GUN

AN AMERICAN ACCOUNT OF ITS EFFECTS WRECKAGE AT MAUBEUGE Mr. Irwin S. Cobb, ono of the bestknown American war correspondents, has collected together his "Experiences with the German Army," and Messrs. llodder and Stoughton havo published them under the title of "Tho ilcd Glutton"—tlio spirit of war. Mr. Cobb is an excellent correspondent ; he watches closely, listens to everything ho is told, beliovcs a littlo of it, ana writes clearly and well. So these sketches of his are interesting, though most of them belong to the days of tlio war that seetn a long way distant iiom lie now. Mr. C'obb has a chapter on the 42centimetre gun. There are some people who have doubted the existence of that gun; Mr. Cobb himself has mot them. It is not unnatural. Tho Gormans, in their he.vdey of success in August, rather overdid the businoss. They told tho world so much about tho superZeppelins and super-gnns with which they were going to remove their enemies from tho face of the earth that the world grew a little sceptical. Certainly tho J2-centimetre gun is said to havo been employed on occasions—tho siege of Antwerp, for instance—where it never came into use. Rut Mr. Cobb says that it was used at Ljcge, and he gives a remarkably vivid description of its effects during the siege of Maubeuge. This is what he has to say:— When tho first of the 42-contiinctres emerged from Essen it took a toam of thirty horsey to haul it; and with it out of 'that nest of the Prussian war eagle came also a force of nicchanics and engineers to set it up and aim it and fire it. Here, too, is an interesting fact that I have not seen printed anywhere, though I heard it often enough ill Germany; by reason of its bulk the 42-cenbimetre must bo mounted upon a concrete base before it can. bo used. Heretofore the concrete which was available for this purpose required at least a fortnight ot exposure beforo it was sufficiently firm and hardened; but when Frauloin Bertha Krupp's engindors escorted the Fraulein's newest and most impressive steel, masterpiece to the war, they brought with them the ingredients for a new kind of concrete; and those who claim to have been present 011 tho occasion declare that within forty-eight hours after they had mixed and moulded it, it was ready to bear the weight of the guns and withstand the shock of their recoil. We spent the better part- of a day in t-wo of the forts which .wore fondly presumed to guard Maubeuge to\vard the north —Fort Des Salts and Fort Boussois; but Fort- Des Sarts was the one where the 42-centimetre gun gave the first exhibition of its powers upon French soil in this war, so we went there first. To reach it we ran a matter of seven kilometres through a succession of villages, each with its mutely eloquent; tale of devastation and general snii'!' ui.tcl! . ■ Our guide pointed off to the - right. "There/' he said, ''is where we dropped the first of our big ones when we were trying to get the range of the fort. You ■ see our guns were posted at a point between eight and nine kilometres away, and at the start we overshot a trifle. Still, to the garrison yonder, it must have been an unhappy foretaste of what they miglit shortly expect, wlien they saw the forty-twos striking, here in this field and saw what execution they did among the cabbage and the beet patches." We left tho car and, following our guide, went to look. Spaced very neatly at intervals apart of perhaps a hundred and. fifty yards a series of craters broke the surface of the earth. Considering the tools which dug them they were rather symmetrical craters, not jagged and gouged, but with smooth walls ana each in shape a perfect funnel. We measured roughly a. typical specimen. Across the top it was between fifty and sixty feet in diameter, and it sloped down evenly for a depth of eighteen feet in the chalky soil to a pointed bottom, where two men would have difficulty standing together without treading upon each other's toes. Its sides were lined with loose pellets of earth of the average size of a tennis ball, and when we slid down, into the hole these rounded clods accompanied us in small avalanches. We were filled with astonishment, first, that an explosive grenade, weighing upward of a ton, could be so constructed that it would penetrate thus far into firm and solid earth before it exploded; and, second, that it could make such a neat saucer of a hole when it did explode. But there was a still more amazing thing to be pondered. Of the earth which had been dispossessed from the crevasse, amounting to a great many wagon-loads, 110 sign remained. It was not heaped up about the lips of the tunnel; it was not visibly scattered over the nearcrmoat furrows of that' tmck field. So far as we might tell it was utterly gone; and from, that we deduced that the force of the, explosion 'had been sufficient to pulverise the clay so finely and cast it so far and.so wide that it fell upon the surface in a fine shower, leaving no traces unless one made a- nunutc search for it. As a fort Des Sarts dated back to 1883. I speak of it in the past tense, because tho Germans had put it in that tense.. As a fort, or as anything resembling a fort, it had ceased to be, absolutely. This had been a series of cunningly buried tunnels and arcades, with cosy subterranean dormitories opening off of side passages, and still further down there had been magazines rnd storage spaces. Now it was all a hole in the ground, and tho force which blasted it out had then pulled the hole in behind itself. We stood on the verge, looking downward into a chasm which seemed to split its way to infinite depths, although' in fact it was probably not nearly so steep as it appeared. If we looked upwards there, forty fc-et abovo our heads, was a wide riven gap in the earth crust. Near me I discerned a litter of metal fragments. From such of tho scraps as retained any shape at all, 1 figured -that they had been part of the protective casing of a ffun mounted somewhere above. The missile which wrecked the gun flung its armous down here. I searched my brain for a simile which might serve to' give a notion of tho present state of that steol jacket. I didn't find the one I wanted, but if you will think of an earthenware pot which has been thrown from a very high building upon a brick sidewalk you may have some idoa of what I saw. At that, it was 110 completer a ruin than any of the surrounding debris. Indeed, in the whole vista of annihilation but two objects remained recognisably intact, and these, strange to say, were two iron bed frames bolted to tho back wall of which I think must hvao been a barraolt-room for officers. Tho room itself was 110 longer thore. Brick, mortar, stone, concrete, steel reinforcements, iron props, the hard-packed earth had been rippnd.out and churned into indistinguishable bits, but thoso two iron beds hung fast to a discoloured patch of plastering, though the floor v.as gone from beneath them. Seemingly they were hardly damaged. Ono gathered that a 42-centimetre shell possessed in some degree the frakishness which wo associate with the behaviour of cyclones.