THE FAMOUS “SEVENTY-FIVES.”

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1539, 15 April 1916, Page 4

THE FAMOUS “SEVENTY-FIVES.”

The famous “seventy-five” gun gets a good deal of its effect from the fact that it has some of the qualities of a machine gun, though it hoses out shrapnel instead of single bullets. It can be moved so as to trace a pattern on the ground with bursting shells. The French gunners speak of their “mowing fire,’’ their “progressive fire,” with which they can follow men up as they charge forward or run away ; and of a terrible combination of the two whereby the battery commander is able to sow any piece of ground with shrapnel so effectually and at such short notice, that nothing human upon it, which is not buried head over ears in a trench, can survive. This is the storm, the dreaded ‘rafale,’ The process of firing the “seventy-five” and the result is described as follows ; “The battery commander rattles off a string of words, containing object range, fuse, and angle of deflection ; while he is yet speaking, the layers a*re on to the mark, the fuse setters are pinching the shell noses, the breech swings open, the traversing number grasps the j worm and wheel gear. And as the captain finishes, on a sharp ' word of command, each'gun, being laid on an axis parallel to its fellow, whizzes off without further command a String of eight shells in two groups of four, and ceases fire. As the last shell leaves the gun the loading number swings open the breech, and stands easy —the whole process has taken exactly twenty seconds; and somewhere about two miles off there is a patch of earth every scran of which has been so beaten by shrapnel bullets that within its area, it is mathematically accurate to say, there is no unprotected living thing.”