BIG GUNS ON FLAT CARS
TO BATTER HUNS' LINES.
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A. E. F. Operates Railroad Artillery that will Hurl
Tons of Steel Twenty Miles into
Enemy's Territory.
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LONG-BARRELLED 155s ARE ALSO DEADLY.
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Fortresses and Mountains Crumble like Sandhills
Before Blasts from the Busters.
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When Rudyard Kipling paid his famous tribute to the late Rear-Admiral "Fighting Bob" Evans of the United States Navy some years ago, one of his verses ran:
"Zogbaum can handle his shadows,
And I can handle my style;
And you can handle a ten-inch gun
To carry seven mile."
That was a pretty fair gun for those days. But nowadays, we speak of handling a sixteen-inch gun to carry twenty miles. Not only do we speak of it, but we—we of the A.E.F.—actually do the handling.
The "big boys" are here. They are busters. They have more machinery attached to them than the average small factory. Because of the fact that they are mounted on cars and ride on rails they are known rather as the "railroad artillery" than the heavy artillery. They have been practicing for a long time on a "blasted heath" somewhere in France, where there wasn't anything within twenty miles of them that would be hurt by their gentle attentions. And, when they do practice Jee-roosh! [Hold onto your ear-drums and open your mouth!]
Big Fellows Hard to Move.
But the actual practice at making perfectly good targets resemble grease-spots on the oil-cloth doesn't take up but a bit of the time of the men who constitute the crew. They have to know a lot about moving the big fellow, raising him and lowering him, anchoring him so he won't right-step and left-step when he's supposed to be firing, cleaning him up for inspection and the like.
About seventy per cent. of them learned a good deal about the firing end back in the Coast Artillery Corps in the States, but this business of riding a big gun on a railroad bed, and so forth, was new to a good many of them until recently. Now, they say, the minute the aero observer up above gives them range and so forth, they are ready to go ahead and batter the eternal daylights out of anything from the Kaiserschloss down to old Hindenburg himself.
Besides the big guns that hurl a whole hardware shop-ful of steel at the enemy, there are long-barreled 155s, and deadly devices they are in their way, too. But it is about the big babies, the instruments which, more than any other save the aeroplanes, typify for most of us the advanced methods of modern warfare, that most of the attention is centered. The 155s and the other smaller bores can be pulled up to [within striking distance of the line] by trucks and caterpillar tractors, but the heftiest never leave the railroad flat cars on which they are built. In other words, they are rolling stock destined to keep a rolling and a rolling and a rolling until they roll right on into Germany.