WITH THE GUNS.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 November 1915, Page 9 (Supplement)

WITH THE GUNS.

MODERN ARTILLERY AND HIGH EXPLOSIVES. WOp: DONE BY ALLIED BATTERIES IN FRANCE. (By Frederick Palmer in Collier's) It is a war of explosions—explosions from bombs thrown by hand within ten ytrds of the enemy: explosions of snells thrown as far as twenty mile3j explosions of mines laid under the enemy's trenches; t war of guns from seven-teen-inch down to three-inch and machine guns; a war of machinery with man still the pre-eminent machine. Gun ranges mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming shells laugh at the gentries at the entrance to towns and at cross-roads who demand the passes of all other travellers. If you tried to keep out of reach of the guns you would never get anywhere near ths front. It is all a matter of chance, with long odds or short odds, according to the, neighbourhood you are in. If the shells come, they cyne without 'warning and without ceremony. Nobody is afraid of shells and everybody is—at least I am. "Gawd! w'at a ; oIeP remarks Mr. Thomas Atkins casually at sight oi an excavation in the earth made by a two-hundred-pound projectile which might have killed a dozen men if it had liit right. THE OLD AND THE NEW.

It 19 only eighteen yeara ago that at the battle of Domoko in the Graeco--furkisb war I saw half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on the plain of •fhessaly and limber up in the open and discharge salvoes with black powder in the good old battle-panorama style. Cne battery of modern field guns, unseen, would have -wiped out the lot in five minutes Only ten years ago at the battle of Liaoyang, as I watched a cloud of shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of Manjanyama which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by impact on the ground, a Japanese military attache remarked- "There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like I" He was right, fle knew bis business as a military attache. Hie voices of the guns along the front seem never silent. In some direction they are always firing. The other night the reports from a certain quartet seemed rather heavy. I asked the reason the next day. "No, not very heavy. No attack," a division staff officer explained. "The Boscbes had been building a redoubt—and we tilrned on some HJ2.V— meaning high-explosive shells. Night after night, undei ihe cover of darkness, the Germans had been labouring away on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved They had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the view of the British trenches. *Such is the hide-and-seek character of modem war. What the German builders did not Know wa9 that a British aeroplane had been watching them day by day and that the spot was nicely registered on a British gunner's map On this map it was a certain numbered point. Press a button, as it were, and you ring the bell with a shell at that point And the gunners waited till the house of cards was up before knocking it to pieces.

SURPRISE IS THE THING WITH THE GUNS.

A town may go for weeks without getting a single shell Then it may get a score on a sudden, or it may be shelled regularly every day "They are shelling X again," or "They have been leaving Z alone for a long time!" is the nature of the news that is passed up and down the line. Towns are proud of having escaped altogether and proud of the number and the size of the shells received. "Did you get any!" I asked the division staff officer who had told me about the session the six-incb howitzer had enjoyed A common question that at the front: "Did you get any meaning Germans A practical question, too. It has nothing to do with the form of play or any bit of sensational fielding only with the score, with results, with casualties. "Yes, quite a number," said the officer. i"Our observer saw them lying about." The guns are watching for targets at all hours—the ever-hungry, ever-ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically calculating, marvellously accurate; also guessing, wondering, blind,' groping, helpless guns which toss their steel messengers over streams, woodlands and towns, searching their unseen prey in a rfide landscape. Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a trench wall or huddle in a "dugout" as you hear an approaching scream and the earth trembles and the air is racked by a concussion and the cry of a wounded man a few yards away tells you of a hit . Very accurate when still others sent from muzzles six or seven thousand yards away fall in that same line of trench. Very accurate when before an attack they cut to bits the barbedwire entanglements in front of a trench! —the power of chaos they seem to possess when the firing trench and the 'dugouts" and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are beaten as Sour is kneaded! Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in a field! when they send their missies toward objects which may not be worth shooting at; when no one sees where their shells hit and the amount of damage thev have done is all guesswork; and helpless svithout the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers to see for them.

THE DEMON FAMILY OF GUNS. One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will without a visible arm behind the "punch " An army guards against the blows of an enemy's demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception, with all the scientific ingenuity of the nth degree of warfare; and an army guards its own demons in llieir lain as vigilantly as if they were made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a glance from the enemy's eye instead of barrels of the strongest steel that can be forged. Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in direct ratio to the amount of hell sent by the enemy which you have tasted. After having been scared stiff while pretending that you were not by-jharing with Mr. Attuns an accurate bombardment of a trench,

you want to pat the demon on the back and say, "Nice old demon!" and watch him toss a shell three or four miles into the Bosches' lines from the end of his fiery tongue. Indeed, nothing so quickly develops interest in the British guns as having the German gunners take too much personal interest in you.

SCREENING THE GUNS.

Yesterday I went gun seeing. You must have someone to show you the way or you would not find any guns. A man with a dog trained to hunt guns might spend a week on the gunposition aera covering ten miles of front and not locate half the guns in that area He might miss "grandmother" and "sister" and "Betsy" and "Mike," and even "MisTfcr Archibald," the only one that does not altogether try to avoid publicity. Archibald the Archer, to give him his I full name, goes about the country banging shells at German aeroplanes. As he carries his house with him, he can run if the German batteries locate him. He may be met anywhere like an automobile police trap; and yet with all the travelling in going and coming from the front you see him seldom, though you often see his puffs of shrapnel smoke chasing a Taube. Realjy he is the patrolman who keeps the aeroplanes from locating the hiding places of the other guns. If German aeroplanes might descend low, they would locate a lot more British batteries than they do. But.when they try to descend low Archibald wings them and the Bosches are short of one aviator and one plane. When an attack or an artillery bombardment is on and you go to as high ground as possible for a "bird's-eye"! view of battle, all you see, is the ex plosion of the shells—never anything of the guns which are firing. Riding along the roads at the front, one may know that there is a battery at a stone's throw only when a blast from a hidden gun muzzle warns him of its presence. It was wonderful to me that the artillery general who took me gun-seeing knew where his own guns were, let alone the enemy's. I imagine that he would return to a field and locate a four-leafed clover he had seen on a previous stroll. His dogs of war had become foxes of war, burrowing in places which wise old father foxes knew were safest from observation. Hereafter I shall not be surprised to see a muzzle poking its head out of an oven, from under grandfather's chair, or under a farm waggon or up a tree or in a servant's garret. Think of the last place in the world for emplacing a gun and one may be there; think of the most likely place and one may not be there. Yon might be walking across the fields and minded to go through a hedge—and bump into a black ring of steel with a gun's cre\v grinning behind it. They would grin because you had given them proof of how well their gun was concealed. But they wouldn't grin as much as they would if they saw the enemy plunking shells into another hedge two hundred yards distant, where the German aeroplane observer thought he had seen a battery and had not. "We'll see a big one first!" said the general.

GUNNERS LOVE THEIR GUNS.

We got out of the car at a cottage and walked along a lane. I looked all about and all I could see was some artillerymen. An officer led me up to a gun breech—at least I know a gun brceeh when it is one foot ■ from my nose and a soldier has removed its covering But I will not tell how that gun was concealed; the method was so audacious ■that it was entirely successful. The Bosches would like to know; and we don't want them to know. A little pencil point on their map for identification and they would send a whirlwind of shells at that gun. And then? Would the gun try to fire baek? No. Its gunners would probably not know the location of any of the Gfermat\ batteries which had concentrated on their treasure. They would "desert" the gun. If they did not, they ought to be courtmartialled for risking the precious lives of trained men needlessly. They would make for the "funk pits" just as the gunner of any other Power at war would. The chances are that the gun itself would not be hit bodily by a shell. Fragments might strike it without causing more than an abrasion; for big guns have pretty thick cuticle. When the storm was over the gunners would move their gun to another hiding place—which would be a good deal of work on account of its size. It is the inability of gun to see gun, and even when seen to knock out gun, which has put an end to the so-called artillery duel of pitched-battle days when cannon walloped cannon to keep cannon from walloping the infantry. Now, when there is an action, though guns still go after guns if they know where they are, most of the firing is done against trendies and support trenches and infantry works or objects which will demoralise the infantry. Concentration of artillery fire will demolish an enemy's trench and let your infantry take possession of the wreckage remaining; but then the- enemy's artillery concentrates on your infantry and frequently makes their new habitations untenable. Noiseless except for a little click, with chickens clucking in the field near-by, the big breech-block which held the shell fast, sending all the power of the explosion out of the muzzle, was swung back, and one

LOOKED THROUGH THE SHINING TUBE.

Of steel with its rifling which caught the driving band and gave the shell its rotation and its accuracy in its long journey which would cease when, descending at the end of its parabola, its nose struck earth or brick or pavements and it exploded. "rt heels that lift the depress and turn the muzzle and gadgets with figures 011 them and other scales which play between tl.e man and the gadgets and atmospheric and wind variations, all worked out with the same precision under a French hedge as 011 board a battleship where the gun mounting is fast to massive ribs of steel—it seemed a master of bookkeeping and trigonometry rather than war. If a shell from this gun went into the dugout of a support trench, it would get everybody present; but if it went ten yards beyond the trench into the open field, it would probably get nobody. "Cover!" someone exclaimed while we were looking at the gun; and everyt body promptly got under the branches of a tree or a shed. A German aeroplane was cruising in our direction. If the aviator saw a group of men standing about, he might draw conclusions and pass the wireless word to send in some shells at whatever number on the German gunner's map was ours. These gunners loved this gun; loved it for the power which it could put into a blow under their trained hands; loved it for the care and the labour

it had meant for them. It is the way of gunners to love their guns or they would not be good gunners. Of all the guns I saw that day, I think that two big howitzers meant the most to their masters. These had just arrived. They had been set up only two days. They had not yet fired against the enemy. For many months the gunners had drilled in England and they had tried their "hows" out on the target range and brought them across the Channel and nursed them along French roads and finally set them up in their lair. When the general approached there was call to turn out the guard; but the general stopped that. At the front there is an end of the ceremoniousness of the barracks. Military formality disappears. Discipline, as well as other things, is simpler and more real. The men went on with the recess playing football in a near-by field The officers possibly were a trifle diffident and uncertain; they

HAD NOT YET THE VETERAN'S MANNER.

It was clear that they had done everything required by the text-book of theory—the latest up-to-date textbook of experience at the front as taught in England. When they showed us how they had stored their stock of shells, to be safe from a shot by the enemy, one remarked that the method was according to the latest directions, though there was some difference among military experts on the subject. When there is such a difference, what is the beginner to do? An old hand, of course, does it his way until an order makes him do otherwise. The dgeneral had a suggestion about the application of the method. He had little to say what he did say seemed in the spirit of comradeship and much to the point. It sems fairly true that one who knows his work well in any branch of human endeavour makes his work appear easy. Once a gunner always a gunner. .The general had spent his life with guns. He was a specialist visit-, ing his plant; one of the staff specialists responsible to a corps commander for the work of the guns on a certain section of map—for accuracy and promptness of fire when it was needed in the commander's plans. If the newcomers put their shells into the target on their first trial, they had qualified; and sometliimes newcomers shoot quite as well as the veterans, which is a surprise to both—and the best kind of news for the general who is in charge of an expanding plant. New guns are only beginning to come; England is only beginning to make war. It takes some time to make a gun and somfc time to train men to fire it. The war will be won by gunners and infantry that ken nothing of guns or drill when the war began. "Here are some who have been in France from the first," said the general when we came to a battery of field guns —of the eighteen-pounders—the fellows you see behind the galloping horses—the hell-for-leather guns—the guns which bring the bleam of affection into the eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the pitchedbattle conditions before armies' settled down in trenches and growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns of calibres which we associate with ba-ttleships and coast fortifications. These are called "light stuff" and "whizzbangs" now in array parlance. They throw only an eighteen-pound shell which scatters three hundred bullets so fast that they chase one another through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of heavy guns that you might think that eigh-teen-pounders were too small for consideration. When the German line is broken they are the ones which can follow as rapidly as the engineers can lay the bridges for them to cross. They are the boys that weave those curtains which you read about in the official bulletins as cheeking an infantry charge; that demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get into a trench. If a general wants a shower of bullets delivered at any part of the line, he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders, and it is sent even more promptly than a pitcher of ice water to a room in a first-class hotel by pressing a button. A veteran eightcen-pounder crew in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement.

THE GUN ITSELF SEEMS TO POSSESS INTELLIGENCE.

It was when leaving another battery that out of the tai! of my eye I caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp, ear-piercing crack which comes from being in line with a gun muzzel when a shot is fired. We followed a path which took us to the rear of the report, where we stepped through undergrowth among the busy groups around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger calibres. An order for some "heavy" stuff at a certain point on the map was being filled. Sturdy men were moving in a pantomine under the shade of willow trees, each doing exactly his part in a process which seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package of concentrated destruction, and closing the door again. All that detail of range finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as an adding machine adds ap a column of figure l ! Everybody was practice perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds of appearances in the [same act 011 the stage. Ready and the word given and a crack and through the air you saw a tiny wingless object rising in a faint curve against the soft blue sky, which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of water through a break in the garden hose multiplied by ten—rising to its zenith and then descending till it passed out of sight behind a bank of foliage on the horizon. After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the gunner's part in chessboard war where the moves are made over the signal wires while the infantry hear the explosions m their trendies ami fight in their charges in the traverses of the trenches at as close quarters as ill the days of the cave dwellers There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. The battery 'commander expressed his regret that he could not show me his guns without any sense of irony, meaning lie was sorry that lie had not time to tell me more about his battery. In about the time that it took a telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts he knew whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of degree to make in the next if it were not, or if the word came to shift the point of aim a little when you were trying to shake them up here and there along a certain length of trench.

At another wire end someone was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he was in the kind of place where I once found one observer who was sitting on a cushion looking out through a ehink broken in a wall, with a signal corps telegraph opeartor near by.

THE FATALISM OF ARTILLERY.

It was a small chink just large enough to allow the lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision. Even then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the chink was removed, though there could not have been any German in uniform nearer than four thousand yards. The Bosches are always on the watcli for chinks. Besides, there may be spies within your own lines looking for holes which were evidently made by hand and not by shell fire. I could make out the German and British trenches m muddy white lines of sandbags running snakelike across the fields; and the oflicer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and hedge and every ditch in the panorama was graven on his mind; all had language for him. His work wa9 el# grossing. It had risks, too; there was no telling when a shell might lift him ofl the cushion and provide a hole for his remains. A near explosion meant the end of his cover. Its concussion would leave him to look through a hole instead of a chink. If he were shelled the observer would go to a "funk pit," as the gunners do, until after the storm had passed, when he would move on with his comfortable cushion and his telegraph instruments and break out another chink if he did not find a tree or some other eminence which suited his taste better. . j\]oanwhile, he was not r the only observer in that section; There were others nearer the trenches, perhaps actually in the trenches. The two armies, seemingly chained bo their trenches, are set with veiled eyes at the end of y.-ires—trying to locate the other's eyes, the other's guns and troops and the least movement which indicates any attempt to gain an advantage. "Gunnery is navigation—dead reckoning—with the spotting observer the sun by which you correct your reckoning," said one of the artillery officers. Firing enough one had seen—landscapes bathed in smoke and dust and reverberating with explosions—but all as a spectacle from the orchestra seat —or too close at hand for comfort. This time I was to see the guns fire and then I was to see the results of the firing in detail. Both can rarely be seen at the same time. It was not show firing' for the sightseer; but part of the day's work for the guns and the general. First the map—"here and there" as an officer's finger pointed on the map; then one looked across the fields, green, brown and golden with summer crops. The Germans were fortifying a certain point on a certain farm. We were going to put in some "heavy stuff" there and some "light stuff," too. The burst of our shells could be located in relation to a certain tree. Our planes thought that the Germans had a wireless station in a certain building. "Heavy stuff" alone for this. Six lyddites was the order for the wireless station, six high explosives which burst on contact and make a bole in the earth large enough for a grave for the Kaiser and all his field marshals. Frequently not only the number of shells to be fired but also the intervals between them ara given by the artillery commander as a part of his plan in his understanding of the object to be accomplished; and it is quite clear that the system is the same with the Germans. One side no sooner develops a new idea than the other adopts it. By effects of the enemy's shells you judge what the effect" of yours must be. Months of experience have done away with all theories; and practice has become much the same by either adversary For example, let a German or British airman be winged by anti-air-eraft gun fire, and the guns instantly loosen up on the point over his own lines if he regains them where he is seen to fall. All the soldiers in the neighbourhood are expected to run out to his assistance; and at any rate you may get the life of a trained aviator whose life is a valuable asset on one side of the ledger; whose death an asset on the other. There isn't anv sentiment left in war, you see. It's all"killing and avoiding being killed.

DEATH FROM AIR AND EARTH.

By the scream of a shell the practised ear of the artilleryman can tell whether it comes from a gun with its lower trajectory or from a howitzer whose projectile rises higher and falls at a sharper angle, which enables it to enter the trenches; and he can even tell approximately the calibre. A scream sweeping past from our rear and we knew that this was for the reboubt, as that was to have the first turn. A volumn of dust and smoke breaking from the earth short of the reboubt and after a fraction of a second's delay came the sound of the burst. The next was over. With the third the "heavy stuff" ought to be right on. But don't forget that there is also an order for some "light stuff" identified as shrapnel by its soft nimbus-like puff which was scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working party as it hastened to cover There you had the ugly method of this modern artillery Are; death shot downward from the air and leaping up out of the earth. Unhappily the third "heavy" was not on, nor the fourth—not exactly on. Exactly on is the way the British gunners like to fill an order f.o.b. express charges prepaid, for the Germans. Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting. It was not very good in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in developing accuracy. At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards the- shells were bursting fifteen or twenty yards away from where they should But what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep any gen eral from being downhearted. Xeithei the guns nor the powder which sent the big shells on their erands, ncithei the calculations of the gunner nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the first one a'burst of the black smoke of the deadly luldite rose above the target. ''liight on!" And i'gnin and again—right on. With every shell the ugly, spreading, hnvhanging, dense cloud was renewed from its heart bv successive hursts in the same place. That wireless station must lie very much wireless now. The only sale discount for the life insurance of the operators was 100 per cent. " I lie Bosches will be coming back at us soon, you will see," said one of the ollicers who was at our observation post. "They always do. The other day they chose this particular spot for their target"—which was a good reason why they would not this timo, an optimist thought. Let either side start a bombardment and the other resnonds. There is a

yon-hit-me-aml l'll-hit-you character to this kind of warfare. Ounfire provokes gunfire. Neither adversary stays quite under a blow. It was not long before we heard tho whish of flerman shells passing some distance away. On our way back to the general's headquarters we learned the object of the German fire in answer to our bombardment of the reboubt and the wireless station. They had shelled a crossroad and a pertain village aaalp