CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 384, 2 June 1915, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

HAVE YOU ENLISTED? If not, why not 1 ' That is the question we put to every single man in New Zealand between the ages of twenty and firtv years. The country wants you! Your comrades at the Dardanelles are calling for help! Everything that is worth living for is at stake! AMiy do you not respond? Have vou a bUMiness.' Do like tile brave Lieut. Wilson did—find a married man to look after it, or close it down. Are you engaged to be married? Postpone your wedding until you have done .your duty by your country. Are you in a good position? Sacrifice it for the sake of your honor. It will be of little use to you if the Empire falls into the hands of the Germans. Arc you the son of a farmer oi settler? Go at once, and leave the farm duties to married men. It is for you and yours that our brave fellows are fighting. Have you. a mother to maintain? Trust her to Cod and the State. Every man who is capable of bearing arms is wanted, and is wanted now! It is idle to say that there are sufficient offering, and that there will be plenty of time by-and-by. That is the excuse of the shirker. It is the duty, the sacred duty, of every man to register—now!—Wairarapa Age.

AN EFFECTIVE GUN.

It was mentioned in Monday's News that the Italians' new 73-m.m. gun was doing very effective, work. In 1!)12 the Italian Government decided to re-arm the artillery with a gun of French invention, an improvement, even,- on the famous "seventy-fives" of the French artillery. Tt will naturally be enquired why the. French Government allowed so important an invention to go to a foreign Power, but the, truth is that as the French authorities were not prepared to face an expenditure of eight millions sterling—the estimated cost of replacing the "seventy-five"—the inventor was permitted to. offer the gun to Italy. The gun is based on the French weapon, which, by the way, has proved itself extraordinarily effective in the present war. The defects of the "scveniyffve" are that its field of fire is restricted, horizontally as well as vertically—a defect it has in- common with most field guns in use —and that it is rather heavy to be operated easily in difficult ground. This latter trouble, by the way, has repeatedly been overcome by the heroic energy of the Frenchmen, but it is none the less a drawback. A eer-1 tain Colonel Deport, after he had retired from the French army, set himself to devise an improved weapon, directing his attention particularly to the field of fire. His first desire was to obtain a wider sweep, and since dirigibles and aeroplanes were promising to play a most important part in warfare he studied the vertical field as well as" the horizontal.

A VERSATILE WEAPON. The difficulties of the wide angles of fire were ingeniously overcome by special cradle and buffer equipment. Instead of the single trail Colonel Deport used a double one, each side of the V being solidly anchored, and the initial advantage he thus obtained was that the guu could Ik; fumed through an angle of fifty degrees. To adapt the gun for high-angle (ire he devised a new cradle, permitting the absorption of the double recoil, the actual recoil allowed being 30in horizontal and 4in vertical. The Deport gun is thus given a vertical

field of fire of fully 70 degrees. Like the French weapon, it ia a "serenty-five," but ii ia scarcely aa powerful, and the projectile ia lighter. There was quite a brisk controversy in France towards the end of 1912 over the sale of the rights of this weapon to a member of the Triple Alliance, but it subsided when the impossibility of scrapping the existing equipment was emphasised. The Italians did not adopt the Deport gun without exhaustive, trials. They had a battery constructed in France and tried it out under all conditions against a Krupp battery and finally arranged for the immediate construction tn thetp own workshops of 112 batteries of the French weapon. The change proceeded in rather easy fashion, however, and the State had to make sure that it was finished with the Tripoli trouble before discarding the Ivrupp guns. Even then the re-arming of service was not complete when the war broke out, and later, when it was seen that artillery was of paramount importance the authorities had to face a big increase in the number of batteries. This, and the inadequate supply of munitions, would be sufficient to account for Italy's hesitation in joining tile Entente.