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Updated: May 26, 2025
Professor Rennick, although a man of peace, had little sympathy with the laws of "civilised" warfare which permit men to be blown into rags of flesh and splinters of bone by explosive shells of a pound weight and upward, and only allow projectiles of less weight to be used against "savages." There was no humbug about him.
For, of course, it might be possible for land as well as sea forces to attack and try to capture the big ditch. The first few days of the voyage were pleasant enough. The weather was fine, and Tom was kept busy explaining to many of the officers aboard the ship the principles of his gun, powder and projectiles.
Imagine the Egyptian needle in Central Park, shod on its apex with hard steel, dropped point downward from the height of Trinity steeple; it weighs 225 tons, and it would strike with just about the effect of one of the 110 ton gun's projectiles. Two of these guns are ready for the ironclad Benbow, and the Italians have several equally powerful of 119 tons from Herr Krupp.
The only new departure is the aeroplane, for the gas attack is another form of the Chinese stink-pot and our old mystery friend Greek fire may claim antecedence to the Flammenwerfer. The tank with its machine guns applied the principle of projectiles from guns behind armor. Steel helmets would hardly be considered an innovation by mediæval knights.
The enemy, having heavy artillery of various calibre mounted on Bulwaan, is able to enfilade certain posts held by our infantry pickets on the heels of the horse-shoe, but there are folds among the rocky kopjes where men can lie comparatively screened from shells, which at that distance give timely notice of their coming, as sound travels rather faster than the projectiles do at the end of their flight.
Behind you, as you looked toward the German lines, was the blanket of night pierced and slashed by the flashes of gun blasts; overhead the bloodcurdling, hoarse sweep of their projectiles; and beyond the darkness had been turned into a chaotic, uncanny day by the jumping, leaping, spreading blaze of explosives which made all objects on the landscape stand out in flickering silhouette.
It was the part of the forest that had suffered so severely from the cannonade, where the projectiles had plowed their way through the secular growths as they might have done through a square of the Old Guard, meeting in either case with the sturdy resistance of veterans.
Then he waved on high his palm-leaf hat. "Viva el Santo Cristo del Grao!..." Other projectiles were falling around the Mare Nostrum, spattering it with jets of foam. Suddenly it trembled from poop to prow. Its plates trembled with the vibration of an explosion. "That's nothing!" yelled the captain, bending himself double over the bridge in order to see better the hull of his ship.
The reliable methods were the same as of old and as I have mentioned elsewhere: projectiles propelled by powder, whether from long-necked naval guns at twenty thousand yards, or short-necked howitzers at five thousand yards, or rifles and machine guns at twenty-five hundred yards, or trench mortars coughing balls of explosives for one thousand yards.
Two one-hundred-ton Armstrongs, each having an effectual range of 12 miles, and two Krupp 15.7-inch guns, which throw shot weighing nearly 2000 pounds over ten miles. Krupp claims a range of 15 miles; but this is doubtful. She also was encased in 21-1/2 inches of compound steel and iron armor, capable of resisting the projectiles of any cannon known except, perhaps, those of her own Armstrongs.
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