BIG FRENCH HOWITZERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16098, 11 December 1915, Page 2 (Supplement)

BIG FRENCH HOWITZERS.

HIDEOUS AND DESTRUCTIVE.

THE HAVOC THEY CAUSE.

Germany has not all the big guns, or all the clever gunners. Britain has some of its own, as the Germans have been realising at Loos and elsewhere. So has France. The French artillery is magnificent. Mr. E. Warner Allen, the representative of the British press with the French army, describes the deadly work done by various types of French guns. "Of all these hideous engines," he writes. " the most hideous and most unnatural was the enormous howitzer. It stood apart from all the lesser monsters in a lair of its own, and it seemed to move of its own volition. One scarcely noticed the men around it, so insignificant did they seem. When we first saw it, it was lying flat like some prehistoric monster waiting for its prey. With the aid of pulleys and a trolley the huge projectile was hauled towards its breach. Then, when the breach was closed, it seemed to wake up, and without any visible human agency it raised its nose over the edge of the pit in which it lived. Tt moved slowly upwards until one could have sworn that it was gazing intently into the clouds above the steep hillside before it. The men who had been ministering to it hastily ran aside, and left a respectful distance between themselves and the monster. The non-commissioned officer who was to fire the great howitzer, as he stood bark on the hillside, seemed no more important than its humblest slave

A Sheet of Flame. " There was a silence. Instinctively one stopped one's ears. There was a great roar, n sheet of flame, and a thin mist of fiercely driven smoke. Everything in the valley shook and trembled, while a hut covered with a tarrmnlin collaosed entirelv, as with a wild bellowing the huge shell tore through the -iir on its way towards the enemy. Then quietly the gun lowered its nose again, and sank buck into its nit with a dignified swagger that seemed to say that there was no reason to make any fuss about the matter. An officer who was standing bv me, remarked. ' Tt is just as if it had blown out a puff of tobacco smoke and could not think why anvVidv should be excited about it.' " Later one we went up to the hills above, and from there we could get some idea, of the havoc that the monsters in the valle- below were working. As we looked over the paraoet of the trenches we could hear t>>e h»nvv reoort of the rmns and the whirr of the bier shells a* they passed over our heads: then it would seem as if a volcano had opened in the German trenches as, with a dull explosion, a black cone of smoke and earth was blown uo into the air. We had onlv to think of the ruin that w<> had seen in the captured lines to reali=<* what was happening over there in the distance."