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Updated: July 21, 2025
About five minutes after it began a hoarse whistle, increasing to a roar like that of a railroad train, passed overhead. "For Ypres," we ejaculated, and looking back we saw a cloud as big as a church rise up from that ill-fated city, followed by the sound of the explosion of a fifteen-inch shell.
It would be interesting to know the history of the two French cannon which, in obedience to the order of Louis XIV, were marked "ULTIMO RATIO REGUM." Iean Maritz, their founder, doubtless regarded them, a century ago, with as much pride as Herr Krupp feels now when he turns out a fifteen-inch steel breech-loader at Essen; but the ultimo ratio regum does not carry as much weight on this side of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century as it carried on the other side in the eighteenth, and the recent discussions between Morro Castle and Admiral Sampson's fleet proved conclusively that the "last argument of kings" is much less cogent and convincing than the first argument of battle-ships.
After viewing the ruins we drove to the little restaurant kept by the pretty milliners, only to find that the place had completely disappeared literally blown to atoms. Later on we found that a fifteen-inch shell had landed in the building next door and both houses had simultaneously vanished.
Was there no end to greyish blue-green monsters, in order as precise as the trees of a California orchard, that appeared out of the greyish blue-green background? First to claim attention was the Queen Elizabeth, with her eight fifteen-inch guns on a platform which could travel at nearly the speed of the average railroad train.
The first of the ships to come into action were the Revenue and the Royal Oak with their fifteen-inch guns, and the Agincourt which fired from her seven turrets with the speed almost of a Maxim gun. The whole British fleet had now become concentrated.
In a circle with a fifteen-inch radius a boy counts the numbers of holes made in the paper by the tiny shot. There should be 300. If there are 290 the gun is passed, but if less it is rejected. Sometimes you get very queer shot patterns without knowing why." "Do all shotguns throw as evenly as that?" "All good ones should.
Wing tip touching wing tip two phantoms passed in the mist fifteen thousand feet above the earth and British plane and German plane which had grazed each other were lost in the bank of cloud. The dark mass which an aviator sees approaching when he is over the battlefield proves to be a fifteen-inch shell at the top of its parabola which passes ten feet over his head.
Huge fifteen-inch guns snaked along, foot by foot, by powerful steam tractors. Then a long line of "four point five" batteries, each gun drawn by six horses, then a couple of "nine point two" howitzers pulled by immense caterpillar engines.
This sea-going fortress was a huge double-turreted monitor, with a ponderous, crushing projectile force in her. Her battery of four fifteen-inch guns, and the tough, insensible solidity of her huge wrought-iron turrets and heavy plated hulk, burdened the sleepy waters of the bay.
Our monitors continue to be armed with the fifteen-inch Rodman, very recent experiments being cited to prove its penetrating effect on iron plates greater than that of the European rifled guns. This, of course, at very close range. The rifle is, in its simplest form, a more complex instrument than the smooth-bored piece, and will always require superior intelligence to manage it.
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