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As is usual in all services, the French commander-in-chief was in one of the best vessels of his fleet. Not only was the Foudroyant a heavy ship, carrying French forty-twos below, a circumstance that made her rate as an eighty, but, like the Plantagenet, she was one of the fastest and most weatherly vessels of her class known.
Six other heavy pieces, Paixhans, I believe, faced the neck of the harbor. The remaining armament of lighter calibre, running, I should judge, from forty-twos down to eighteens. Only one gun lay on the ground destitute of a carriage.
When they exploded in the open street they not only tore a hole in the pavement the size of a cottage cellar, but they sliced away the facades of all the houses in the immediate vicinity, leaving their interiors exposed, like the interiors upon a stage. Compared with the "forty-twos" the shell and shrapnel fire of the first night's bombardment was insignificant and harmless.
The Austrian "thirty-point-fives" have done much of the smashing ascribed to the "forty-twos," and ordinary work, like that of bombarding a city or infantry trenches, by cannon of smaller caliber. A genuine forty-two had been dropped here, however, we were told, on a building used by the Russians to store ammunition, and the building had simply disappeared.
Poor devils, their hopes crumbled along with their walls when the Germans brought up the forty-twos. We entered in through a breach in the first parapet and crossed, one at a time, on a tottery wooden bridge which was propped across a fossé half full of rubble, and so came to what had been the heart of the fort of Des Sarts.