DOCTORING DAMAGED GUNS

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 145998, 3 December 1917, Page 6

DOCTORING DAMAGED GUNS

REPAIR .WORK BEHIND THE LINE. Correspondents’ Headquarters, Oct. a. The weather to-day is still beautiful, but the wind seems to have shifted ominoush- to the south-west, and the air is hazy. With poor visibility and in tho absence of counter-attacks our guns are quieter than lor some days, and. sulrcly the rest cannot be unwelcome, for the volume and persistence of our artillery lire nowadays are almost mcredible, rvnd one its not surprised xnafc the Germans speak of it in the terms thov do, or that they ‘exaggerate the weight of our bombardments, just as they do tho numbers of our divisions engaged in anv attack and the amount of our losses bv anything from 50 to oqo per cent. Our guns themselves arc much bettor than wc had any right to expect, so that pieces whose normal life mi ,r ht be calculated at six or seven thousand rounds tiro .I*3 nr 14 thousand rounds without loss of accuracy. Mow accurate they are is shown by all the accounts of our barrages, and by the various instances of fine gunnery which I have quoted from time to time. Besides the guns themselves, however, enormous credit is due to our gunners, ns well as to the character of tho ammunition ;ind to the people who make it at home. Besides all these, by no means the least important factor is the workshops, being hospitals for sick guns, which., like dressing stations for human casualties, are ever pushing up behind our lines. The establishment and tho machinery for handling and repairing things like big guns are reasonably cumbersome, with the great cranes, dynamos, lathes planers, and other heavy machine tools which are needed, but one of those shops rushes up into now waste country where the whole area of the. shop has'to be paved or floored before a- lorry or a gun can he moved Vvt it. A shop building must bo erected and plant installed, and the whole life of a little industrial community started. Yet two days after arrival tins thing will all he running and at work curing guns. VISIT TO A .GUN HOSPITAL. Once worn out, of course, no gun can bo doctored here, but innumerable minor casualties, whether to carriage or mechanism can be repaired on the spot, and at a minimum loss of time guns arc back at their good work again. At one such workshop to-day I saw the little six. eight, and nine-inch playthings in all stages of repair and convalescence. A direct hit from an enemy shell on the barrel of tho gun does not much matter to the gun, though it probably will wreck the carriage, and one such monster I saw which had been hit fairly on the barrel, which was dented and seas red and pock-marked, but still perfectly sound. Tho carriage, however, was riot of much use, except as old metal. Close by was a worn-out gun whose carriage was sound, so an exchange was just being effected, and on tho good carriage the old battered vetcren is by now, 1 expect, on its way to the scene of its job again. “With luck I shall send back seven to-day,” said the officer in charge. It needs good men for such work as this, and when 1 was there the whole staff wore working like beavers. The officer in/charge told me how keen and cheery they were and how regardless of the length of hours they worked when things wore lively, as nowadays they always are. One is so much absorbed in the men who visibly do the fighting that one is alwaws inclined, to fail to think enough of the men who work as hard with equal keenness, and not seldom with not much less danger, In all the colossal activities behind the lines. A? I have said more than once," it is not the.numb or of men with rifle or bayonet we put in the trendies that "is the real miracle of this arrav of ours, but it is the whole gigantic dimensions of the great machine, which is so complicated. so -orderly, and so extremely competent in all its parts. i