The difference in language made occasional difficulties of course. "It took us a couple of days to realize that when our instructor spoke of a 'rangerrang' he meant a 'range error,'" said one American officer, "but now we get on famously."
We left the men in the tower with their maps and their glasses and went down to see the guns. Our guide took us straight in front of the one hundred and fifty-fives while they were firing, which was safe enough as they were tossing their shells high in the air. It was better fun, though, to stand behind these big howitzers, for by fixing your eye on a point well up over the horizon it was possible to see the projectile in flight. The shell did not seem to be moving very fast once it was located. It looked for all the world as if the gunners were batting out flies and this was the baseball which was sailing along.
The French officer who was showing us about said that he could see the projectile as it left the mouth of the gun, but though the rest of us tried, we could see nothing but the flash. Later we stood behind the seventy-fives but since their trajectory is so much lower it is not possible to see the shell which they fire. They seemed to make more noise than the bigger guns. Fortunately it is no longer considered bad form to stick your fingers in your ears when a gun goes off. Most of the officers and men in this particular battery were as careful to shut out the sound of the cannon as schoolgirls at a Civil War play. Not only did they stuff their fingers in their ears, but they stood up on their toes to lessen the vibration.
Guns have changed, however, since Civil War days. They are no longer drab. Camouflage has attended to that. The guns we saw were streaked with red and blue and yellow and orange. They were giddy enough to have stood as columns in the Purple Poodle or any of the Greenwich Village restaurants.
Before we left the camp we met Major General Peyton C. March, the new chief of staff, who was then an artillery officer. We agreed that he was an able soldier because he told us that he did not believe in censorship. Regarding one slight phase of the training he bound us to secrecy, but for the rest he said: "You may say anything you like about my camp, good or bad. I believe that free and full reports in the American newspapers are a good thing for our army."
We traveled many miles from the field gun school before we came to the camp of the heavies. This, too, was a French school which had been partially taken over by the Americans. The work was less interesting here, for the men were not firing the guns yet, but studying their mechanism and going through the motions of putting them in action. Many of the officers attached to the heavies were coast artillerymen and there was a liberal sprinkling of young reserve officers who had come over after a little preliminary training at Fortress Monroe. The General in charge of the camp told us that these new officers would soon be as good as the best because the most important requirement was a technical education and these men had all had college scientific training or its equivalent. Just then they were all at school again cramming with all the available textbooks about French big guns. They did not need to depend on textbooks alone, for the camp contained types of most styles of French artillery.
The pride of the contingent was a monster mounted on railroad trucks. It fired a projectile weighing 1800 pounds. After the French custom, the big howitzer had been honored by a name. "Mosquito" was painted on the carriage in huge green letters.
"We call her mosquito," explained a French officer, "because she stings."
"Mosquito" had buzzed no less than three hundred times at Verdun, but she had a number of stings left. The Americans detailed with the gun were loud in its praises and asserted that it was the finest weapon in the world. There were other guns, though, which had their partisans. Some swore by "Petite Lulu," a squat howitzer, which could throw a shell high enough to clear Pike's Peak and still have something to spare. There were champions also of "Gaby," a long nosed creature which outranged all the rest. Marcel could talk a little faster than any gun in camp, but her words carried less weight.
All the menial work about the camp was done by German prisoners. I was walking through the camp one day when I saw a little tow-headed soldier sitting at the doorstep of his barracks watching a file of Germans shuffle by. They were men who had started to war with guns on their shoulders, but now they carried brooms.