GUN HOSPITALS.

Taihape Daily Times, 27 November 1917, Page 5

GUN HOSPITALS.

The volume and persistence of the British artillery nowadays are almost incredible, the correspondent of the London Times wrote recently. Our guns themselves are much better than we had any right to expect, so that pieces; whose normal life might be calculated! at 6000 or 7000 rounds fire 13,000 or 14,000 without loss of accuracy. Be*. sides the guns themselves, however, enormous credit is due to our gunners, as well as to the character of the ammunition and to the people who make it at home. By no means the least important factor is the work of what are known as the mobile ordnance workshops, being hospitals for sick guns, which, like dressing stations for human casualties, are ever pushing up behiud our lines. The establishment and the machinery for handling and repairing things like big guns reasonably cumbersome, with the great cranes, dynamos, lathes, planers, and other heavy machine tools which are needed, but one of shops rushes up into new waste country where the whole area of the shop has to be paved or-floored before a lorry or a gun can be moved in it. A shop building must be erected and plant installed, and the whole life of a little industrial, community started. Yet two days after arrival the thing will all bo running and at work curing guns.