Sarts was the one where the 42-centimeter gun
gave the first exhibition of its powers upon French soil in this war, so
we went there first. To reach it we ran a matter of seven kilometers
through a succession of villages, each with its mutely eloquent tale of
devastation and general smash to tell; each with its group of
contemptuously tolerant German soldiers on guard and its handful of
natives, striving feebly to piece together the broken and bankrupt
fragments of their worldly affairs.

Approaching Des Sarts more nearly we came to a longish stretch of
highway, which the French had cleared of visual obstructions in
anticipation of resistance by infantry in the event that the outer ring
of defenses gave way before the German bombardment. It had all been
labor in vain, for the town capitulated after the outposts fell; but it
must have been very great labor. Any number of fine elm trees had been
felled and their boughs, stripped now of leaves, stuck up like bare
bones. There were holes in the metaled road where misaimed shells had
descended, and in any one of these holes you might have buried a horse.
A little gray church stood off by itself upon the plain. It had been
homely enough to start with. Now with its steeple shorn away and one of
its two belfry windows obliterated by a straying shot it had a rakish,
cock-eyed look to it.

Just beyond where the church was our chauffeur halted the car in
obedience to an order from the staff officer who had been detailed by
Major von Abercron, commandant of Maubeuge, to accompany us on this
particular excursion. Our guide pointed off to the right. "There," he
said, "is where we dropped the first of our big ones when we were trying
to get the range of the fort. You see our guns were posted at a point
between eight and nine kilometers away and at the start we overshot a
trifle. Still to the garrison yonder it must have been an unhappy
foretaste of what they might shortly expect, when they saw the forty-
twos striking here in this field and saw what execution they did among
the cabbage and the beet patches."

We left the car and, following our guide, went to look. Spaced very
neatly at intervals apart of perhaps a hundred and fifty yards a series
of craters broke the surface of the earth. Considering the tools which
dug them they were rather symmetrical craters, not jagged and gouged,
but with smooth walls and each in shape a perfect funnel. We measured
roughly a typic