I am pretty sure the German is as good a gunner as may be found on the Continent of Europe to-day.  This may not apply to him at sea, for he has neither the sailor traditions nor the inherited naval craftsmanship of the English; but judging by what I have seen I am quite certain that with the solid earth beneath him and a set of figures before him and an enemy out of sight of him to be damaged he is in a class all by himself.

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.  Some few, he said, hit the walls or at the bases of the walls, but all the others, he claimed, had bull’s-eyed into the fort itself.

Subsequently, on subjecting this tale to the acid test of second thought I was compelled to doubt what the staff officer had said.  To begin with, I didn’t understand how a 42-centimeter gun could be fired one hundred and forty-seven times without its wearing out, for I have often heard that the larger the bore of your gun and the heavier the charge of explosives which it carries, the shorter is its period of efficiency..  In the second place, it didn’t seem possible after being hit one hundred and forty-seven times with 42-centimeter bombs that enough of any fort of whatsoever size would be left to permit of a tallying-up of separate shots.  Ten shots properly placed should have razed it; twenty more should have blown its leveled remainder to powder and scattered the powder.

Be the facts what they may with regard to this case of the fort of Manonvilla—­if that be its proper name—­I am prepared to speak with the assurance of an eyewitness concerning the effect of the German fire upon the defenses of Maubeuge.  What I saw at Liege I have described in a previous chapter of this volume.  What I saw at Maubeuge was even more convincing testimony, had I needed it, that the Germans had a 42- centimeter gun, and that, given certain favored conditions, they knew how to handle it effectively.

We spent the better part of a day in two of the forts which were fondly presumed to guard Maubeuge toward the north—­Fort Des Sarts and Fort Boussois; but Fort Des Sarts was the one where the 42-centimeter gun gave the first exhibition of its powers upon French soil in this war, so we went there first.  To reach it we ran a matter of seven kilometers through a succession of villages, each with its mutely eloquent tale of devastation and general smash to tell; each with its group of contemptuously tolerant German soldiers on guard and its handful of natives, striving feebly to piece together the broken and bankrupt fragments of their worldly affairs.