few hundred yards away, were half a
dozen targets of the size and outline of German soldiers. "Try 'em
out," suggested the officer in command of the school. So I seated
myself behind the German gun, looked into a ground-glass finder like
that on a newspaper photographer's camera, swung the barrel of the
weapon until the intersection of the scarlet cross-hairs covered the
mirrored reflection of the distant figures, and pressed together a
pair of handles. There was a noise such as a small boy makes when he
draws a stick along the palings of a picket fence, a series of
flame-jets leaped from the muzzle of the gun, and the targets
disappeared. "You'd have broken up that charge," commented the officer
approvingly. "Try the others." So I tried them all--Maxim, Hotchkiss,
Colt, St. Etienne, Lewis--in turn.

"Which do you consider the best gun?" I asked.

"That one," and he pointed to Colonel Lewis's invention. "It is the
lightest, simplest, strongest, and most effective machine-gun made. It
weighs only twenty-five and a half pounds and a clip of forty-seven
rounds can be fired in four seconds. At present we have four to each
company--though the number will probably be increased shortly--and
they are so easy to handle that in an attack they go over with the
second wave."

"But our Ordnance Department claims that they cannot fire two thousand
rounds without heating and jamming," I remarked.

"Who ever heard of a machine-gun being called upon to fire two
thousand rounds under actual service conditions?" he asked scornfully.
"On the front we rarely exceed two hundred or three hundred rounds;
five hundred never. Long before that number can be fired the attack is
broken up or the gun is captured."

"In any event," said I, "the American War Department, to whom Colonel
Lewis offered his patents, asserts that the gun did not make good on
the proving-grounds of Flanders."

"Well," was the dry response, "it has made good on the proving-grounds
of Flanders."

The pretty little casino at Paris Plage, where, in the days before the
war, the members of the summer colony used to dance or play at _petits
chevaux_, has been converted into a lecture-hall for machine-gunners.
Covering the walls are charts and cleverly painted pictures which
illustrate at a glance the important roles played by machine-guns in
certain actions. They reminded me of those charts which they use in
Sunday-schools to explain the flight of the Israelites out of E