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Updated: May 6, 2025
There was an old gentleman there, in command, who was rightly proud of being the civilian nearest to the front line. He displayed to us with great pride a souvenir found in Ypres, the huge base of a 17-inch shell it was almost too heavy for one man to lift. We had our Church Service and our concerts in the marquee attached to the Y.M.C.A. hut.
Whatever surprise in the shape of 17-inch howitzers or 900-foot Zeppelins the Kaiser may have for us, it is a safe prophecy that it will be a small matter compared to that which Sir John French and his men will be to him. But above all I look forward to the development of our mounted riflemen. This I say in no disparagement of our cavalry, who have done so magnificently.
Sir Norman Lockyer pronounced it to be "one of the instruments of the future"; and the principle of its construction was immediately adopted by the directors of the Besançon and Algiers Observatories, as well as for a 17-inch telescope destined for a new observatory at Buenos Ayres. At Paris, it has since been carried out on a larger scale.
Some effective scouting was done by an aeroplane sent up from one of the British cruisers early in the afternoon, and the British report that they saw and fired on a Zeppelin early in the morning of June 1, 1916. But this is all. There have been stories for many months of a 17-inch gun of marvelous power carried by German dreadnoughts, but no such weapon made its appearance on this occasion.
Heavy reinforcements had been brought to the Verdun front by the Germans, and it was estimated that their forces engaged in the attack numbered at least 500,000 men, supported by numerous 15-inch and 17-inch Austrian mortars, with all the heavy German artillery used in the Serbian campaign and part of that formerly employed on the Russian front.
"Zeppelins did not play the important part attributed to them. Only one appeared. It remained in action a brief time, retiring under heavy fire, evidently badly damaged. Weather conditions were such that it is doubtful whether any aircraft would have been of much service. "The enemy sprang no surprises. We saw nothing of any 17-inch guns.
And when you get outside you have an excellent opportunity of estimating the mechanism which brought about this admirable triumph of destruction; for there is a hole made by a 17-inch shell; it is at a moderate estimate fifty feet across, and it has happened to tumble into a graveyard, so that the hole is littered with the white bones of earlier Christians.
True, big guns, long since established on concrete foundations and quite immobile, could still register by the map as accurately as ever, and still poured shells of large dimensions on Fort Douaumont and on other sectors; but the smaller guns, mere babes compared with those 17-inch howitzers, yet guns flinging missiles which pounded the French trenches, could now only fire aimlessly, so that the torrent of shells was reduced and became a mere nothing to that formerly experienced.
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