At this moment the orderly reported that the battery commander authorized two shots against the village in question. At command the gun crew sprang to their posts about the mortar, which was already adjusted for its target, a little less than six miles away, the gun muzzle pointing skyward at an angle of about 60 degrees. As the gun was fired the projectile could be seen and followed in its course for several hundred feet. The report was not excessively loud.
Before the report died away the crew were busy as bees about the gun. One man, with the hand elevating gear, rapidly cranked the barrel down to a level position, ready for loading. A second threw open the breech and extracted the brass cartridge case, carefully wiping it out before depositing it among the empties; four more seized the heavy shell and lifted it to a cradle opposite the breech; a seventh rammed it home; number eight gingerly inserted the brass cartridge, half filled with a vaseline-like explosive; the breech was closed, and the gun pointer rapidly cranked the gun again into position. In less than thirty seconds the men sprang back from the gun, again loaded and aimed. A short wait, and the observer from his post near the village ordered "next shot fifty meters nearer."
The gun pointer made the slight correction necessary, the mortar again sent its shell purring through the air against the village, which this time, it was learned, broke into flames, and while the men went back to their noonday rest, the Lieutenant explained the fine points of his beloved guns. One man, as had been seen, could manipulate the elevation gear with one hand easily and quickly; ten of his horses could take the mortar, weighing eight tons, anywhere; it could fire up to 500 shots per day. He was proud of the skillful concealment of his guns, which had been firing for four days from the same position without being discovered, although French aviators had located all the sister batteries, all of which had suffered loss from shrapnel fire.
Along the roadside through the Côte Lorraine were here and there graves with rude crosses and penciled inscriptions. At the western edge of the forest the battle panorama of the Meuse Valley suddenly opened out, the hills falling away again steeply to the level valley below. The towns below—St. Mihiel and Banoncour—seemed absolutely deserted, not a person being visible even around the large barracks in the latter town. While the little party of officers and spectators, including the correspondent, were watching the artillery duel on the far horizon or endeavoring to pick out the infantry positions, a shrapnel suddenly burst directly before them, high in the air. There was a general stir, the assumption being that the French had taken the group on the hillside for a battery staff picking out positions for the guns; but as other shots were fired it was seen that the shrapnel was exploding regularly above the barracks, a mile and a half away, the French evidently suspecting the presence of German troops there.
A ten-mile ride southward led to the position of the Austrian 12-inch battery. The two guns this time were planted by the side of the road, screened only in front by a little wood, but exposed to view from both sides, the rear, and above. For this greater exposure the battery had paid correspondingly, several of its men having been killed or wounded by hostile fire. Here, as in the German batteries, the war work in progress went on with a machinelike regularity and absence of spectacular features more characteristic of a rolling mill than a battle. The men at the guns went through their work with the deftness and absence of confusion of high-class mechanics. The heavy shells were rolled to the guns, hoisted by a chain winch to the breech opening, and discharged in uninteresting succession, a short pause coming after each shot, until the telephonic report from the observation stand was received. The battery had been firing all day at Fort Lionville, at a range of 9,400 meters, (nearly six miles,) and the battery commander was then endeavoring to put out of action the only gun turret which still answered the fire. The task of finding this comparatively minute target, forty or fifty feet in diameter, was being followed with an accuracy which promised eventual success.
The shells from the guns started on their course with characteristic minute-long shrieks. Watches were pulled out to determine just how long the shrieks could be heard, and the uninitiated were preparing to hear the sound of the explosion itself. The battery chief explained, however, that this scream was due to the conditions immediately around the muzzle of the gun, and could not be heard from other points. He invited close watch of the atmosphere a hundred yards before the gun at the next shot. Not only could the projectile be seen plainly in the beginning of its flight, but the waves of billowing air, rushing back to fill the void left by the discharge and bounding and rebounding in a tempestuous sea of gas, could be distinctly observed. This airy commotion caused the sound heard for more than a minute.
The Slaughter in Alsace
By John H. Cox of The London Standard.
BASLE, Switzerland, Aug. 19.—I have just returned from an inspection of the scenes of the recent fighting between the French and Germans in the southern districts of Alsace.
Dispatches from Paris and Berlin describe the engagements between the frontier and Mülhausen as insignificant encounters between advance guards. If this be true in a military sense, and the preliminaries of the war produce the terrible effects I have witnessed, the disastrous results of the war itself will exceed human comprehension.