Middle picture copyrighted by Underwood & Underwood BIG GUNS OF THREE BELLIGERENTS

Upper picture: a Krupp 42-centimetre howitzer, the one real surprise among the weapons of the war. Middle picture: a French 8-inch rapid fire howitzer mounted on a flat car. Lower picture: an Italian siege gun used to batter down Austrian concrete trenches

Upper picture: Germans building barbed wire entanglements, which are put in place in front of the trenches (as in the lower picture) to impede the enemy. Middle picture: a permanent wire entanglement protecting a bridgehead in Russia

AN AUTOMOBILE PROTECTED AGAINST BARBED WIRE

The scythe-like arrangement catches wires stretched across roadways and lifts them over the roof of the automobile or forces them under the wheels

A FRENCH DEVICE FOR BREAKING THROUGH WIRE ENTANGLEMENTS The propeller-like blade is fired from a gun and carries a wire cable that is paid out from a reel beside the gun. The blade catches in the enemy's entanglement and is then drawn back with the cable, hauling the barbed wire with it

of combat, long accounted obsolete, came back into use. Paradoxically, the use of the newest and most complex weapons has forced back into favor the simplest and most ancient weapons.

The year 1886 saw the beginnings of the first big change in warfare that bore fruit in the present war. In that year, experiments were made at Fort Malmaison in France which demonstrated beyond doubt that the fortifications of that day were obsolete. Eight-inch shells containing

large charges of melinite, a "high explosive," overturned revetment works, destroyed magazine casemates, and made breaches in the walls with ridiculous ease. Offensive gun - power had overtaken and passed defensive works in their age-long race for supremacy.

Bottom picture copyrighted by International News Service
THE MODERN SUCCESSOR OF THE

The machine-gun is, like the first field artillery of three centuries ago, simply a concentration of rifle fire.

machine

Instantly that race was renewed with nerve-racking intensity. Military engineers were divided into two camps. The extreme radicals on the one hand declared that the day of fixed fortifications was gone forever: that the only useful fortress of the future would be extemporized in the field. The extremists in the other direction maintained that forts could be made much stronger than they werestrong enough to resist any weapon: and that such forts were indispensable to the

protection of cities and frontiers.

The Germans became disciples of the first theory while the French and the Belgians followed the second. The results of the German decision were not soon apparent: it is easier to keep the secret of a big gun

than to keep the secret

Middle picture copyrighted by International News Service

On the left: German machine guns. On the right: British (upper), French (middle), and Russian (lower) guns