March 6, 1915. 
LAND AND .W. A T E R. 
oi>en than against men dug in. It is in the third 
kind of weapon that the solution is rather to be 
discovered, and this kind of weapon is the heavy 
gun. The heavy guns are concealed just as all the 
others are; positions are chosen lor them well 
behind the lines where they are effective on account 
of their much longer range : 6,000, 7,000, 8,000 
yards or more are available to them as ranges of 
perfectly accurate fire, and their eft'ect against 
men in trenches is something very different, and 
that for the following causes : 
(1) In the first place, what their shells do 
when they fall is on quite another scale from the 
shells of the field artillery. In the more numerical 
computation (which is not everything) they have 
an effect varying with the size of their calibre. 
A six-inch gun does not fire a shell twice as effec- 
tive as a three-inch gun. It fires a shell eight 
times as effective. But one cannot put the thing 
numerically at all, because a six-inch shell falling 
into a trench has far more than eight times the 
effect on the defenders, both in actual losses and 
in the confusion caused, than a three-inch shell. 
(2) These hea^T- shells destroy a trench where 
they fall. They " knock it to pieces." They 
batter the walls of earth and make them fall in; 
they open big craters, ruining the spade work in 
their neighbourhood, and they create a state of 
affairs which cannot be repaired while the shelling 
is going on. 
(3) In the third place, they are much harder 
to discover, working as they do at a long range 
and with a higher angle ofYire than the smaller 
pieces. They can be concealed, not only by arti- 
ficial methods, but behind considerable rises of 
ground. It is obvious that the longer the range of 
a piece the larger the area you have to search in 
order to discover it. 
i 
/ 
c 
f ^ 
» 
t 
t 
1 
1 
\ 
\ 
\ 
\ 
\ 
\ 
\ 
\ 
\ 
\ 
\ 
' \ 
Ai 
* 
/ 
K 
A 
\ 
\ 
\ 
t 
c 
t 
E 
A — A — A. But pieces with a range of C — B can 
be anywhere along the much more extended lino 
C — C — C, and their choice of concealment ia 
therefore much greater. 
(4) The big piece is not disturbed by rifle fire 
or by field gun fire or by any weapon except its 
own peer. I have, for instance, a battery of heavy 
pieces behind the hill at M. It is well concealea, 
and it can shell, with disastrous effect, the whole 
line of the enemy's trenches between F and G, and 
nothing can knock it out except a similar body of 
the enemy's, similarly concealed at N. The only 
way in which the guns at N can knock out the 
guns at AI is by finding out exactly where they are, 
whether by their flashes, which ought, if the con- 
cealment has been properly managed, to be in- 
visible, or by air work, and it is, in point of fact, 
air work alone which is of any real use in this 
kind of struggle. 
(5) Perhaps the most important of all the 
advantages of the hea\y piece after the effect it 
has where the shell falls is the angle at which the 
shell falls. A heavy piece firing at a range of 
several thousand yards comes down ujion the 
trenches from above, and the effect is largely pro- 
portionate to the angle at v/hich the blow falls. 
Thus, we see in this diagram how the trajec- 
tory of a field piece at F exploding a shell at A 
Pieces with such a radius as K — B firing at 
a mark at B must be somewhere along the line 
above the trench T will do a certain amount of 
execution, but the heavy gun at G, firing 
along the trajectory G — A, comes right down on 
to the trench with a very different and much mora 
active blow. At very long ranges it has the effeclj 
of falling almost perpendicularly, and with an 
accurate aim, of destroying all the work and most 
of the mind within it. 
!• 
