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Updated: June 12, 2025
They are more nearly like the little town of Ossowetz on the Bobr River, which held out against the German 42-centimeter guns for over six months, and was then evacuated only because its defenders were flanked out. There was very little concrete in the Gorizia defenses, which were mostly earthworks formed into terraces on which the guns were mounted.
It had been a wine shop. It was now a beer shop. There had been a French proprietor; he had a German partner now. It had been only a few weeks you could not as yet measure the interval of time in terms of months since the Germans came and sat themselves down before Maubeuge and blew its defenses flat with their 42-centimeter earthquakes and marched in and took it.
There was something in the war unseen by Thompson and the Hendersons and a countless host of intelligent, well-dressed, comfortable people who bought extras wet from the press to read of that merciless thrust through Belgium, the shock and recoil and counter-shock of armies, of death dealt wholesale with scientific precision, of 42-centimeter guns and poison gas and all the rest of that bloody nightmare they did not see the dread shadow that hung over Europe lengthening and spreading until its murky pall should span the Atlantic.
I did not see a 42-centimeter gun with my own eyes, and personally I doubt whether the Germans had as many of them as they claimed to have; but I talked with one entirely reliable witness, an American consular officer, who saw a 42-centimeter gun as it was being transported to the front in the opening week of the war, and with another American, a diplomat of high rank, who interviewed a man who saw one of these guns, and who in detailing the conversation to me said the spectator had been literally stunned by the size and length and the whole terrific contour of the monster.
The wagon boss, knowing the red man's fear of cannon, had swung the great boiler around so that it had appeared to point at them. Never was so big a cannon. Even the 42-centimeter howitzers of today could not compare with it. The Indians took one look at it, then departed that part of the country as fast as their ponies could travel.
A German staff officer, who professed to have been present, told me that at Manonvilla so he spelled the name a 42-centimeter gun was fired one hundred and forty-seven times from a distance of 14,000 meters at a fort measuring 600 meters in length by 400 meters in breadth a very small target, indeed, considering the range and that investigation after the capture of the fort showed not a single one of the one hundred and forty-seven shots had been an outright miss.
"I tell you, sir," he declared, "I would rather be instrumental in bringing to an end this cruel war which is now deluging the pages of history with the heart's blood of the people, whose voices may now be drowned in the roar of the 42-centimeter guns, but whose spirits will unite in the black stench clouds which rise from the festered fields of Flanders to descend upon the heads of those who by Divine Right have murdered them, I would rather be instrumental in bringing about this result, than be President of the United States!"
Meantime, moving over the roads toward Namur, toiled the huge German 42-centimeter guns. The German General Staff had taken to mind the lesson of Liege. Each gun was transported in several parts, hauled by traction engines and forty horses. Of this, with the advance of Von Kluck and Von Bülow, the Belgian General Staff was kept in total ignorance by the German screen of cavalry.
From the viewpoint of the Germans the consequences to the foe must amply have justified the trouble and the cost. For where a 42-centimeter shell falls it does more than merely alter landscape; almost you might say it alters geography.
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