iled, and later, by the irony of fate, proved to be the very things
required when the unforeseen war conditions developed.

A WONDERFUL GUN.

The Germans and Austrians believed that they could develop a big gun
which could be given sufficient mobility for use in the field, and with
commendable and methodical application they proceeded to do so. The
theory was, first, that it could batter down any permanent
fortifications that man could build, and when it was pitted against the
concrete ramparts of Liege and Namur it blew them out of existence in a
few hours. The Teutons had scored, and scored so heavily that the Allies
barely escaped the fate the Germans had prepared for them in an
overwhelming sweep on Paris. That they did escape this fate is no doubt
in a large measure due to the fact that the second effectiveness claimed
by the Teutons for their heavy ordnance failed in its full
accomplishment. Used in open fighting, the great explosive shells hurled
by these guns did not do the damage expected to the wide, open firing
lines of the Allies, nor did they produce the moral effect expected. The
great shells tore tremendous craters in the ground, from which the
force of the explosion was expended upward in a sort of cone-shape,
shooting above the heads of any troops in the vicinity except those
immediately adjacent to the explosion. In the meantime the field pieces
of the French, with their extreme mobility and rapidity of fire, were
scattering death and destruction with their straight shrapnel fire in
the solid formations which were so popular with the Germans in the early
stages of the war, and which today they do not seem to be able to drop
entirely.

So far the French piece did all expected of it. The German piece had
proved its ability only to blow up permanent fortifications, and this
was nullified immediately by the action of the French in abandoning the
concrete shelters and moving their own guns into newly and
quickly-constructed trench forts.

A THING UNDREAMED OF.

But the thing that neither side had dreamed of was the settling down of
the war on the west front into an eternal line of opposing trenches to
face each other for years. That it did so was due to the monumental
blunders on the part of the German staff in allowing itself to be
outmaneuvered and beaten back from the gates of Paris by numerically
inferior forces, and still further outmaneuvered in the extension of the
lines northward in that f