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attacks impossible, the incentive to do this is taken away. Even the very possibility of doing it has been removed by these same air scouts. Their signals to the gunners of their batteries render the shell fire from distant and concealed artillery so deadly accurate that a general advance is out of the question. Hence the lines of trenches approach one another by a few yards at a time until they are only from 90 to 200 or 300 feet apart.

With troops opposed at these close quarters, warfare at once leaps backward in its methods one hundred years, five centuries, a millennium. Unable to

shoot more than an occasional in

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GERMAN FIRE ROCKETS ILLUMINATING A RUSSIAN POSITION

By means of these rockets, which are fired from a pistol, the enemy's trenches are subjected to artillery fire by night, and his infantry attacks are detected before they can become dangerous

rifle bullets aimed directly at him by enemies that can see him plainly. Having got himself barriered behind a low rampart of earth, he waits for night to fall to undertake the more laborious, if less hazardous, task of digging a trench deep enough to stand in and of connecting his chamber with those of his comrades to right and left of him; and then running back zigzag connections with the similar line of trenches behind him.

Once safely in, his commander, even ten years ago, would at once have begun to calculate some decisive disposition of his troops for a general attack that should determine the result in open battle. But to-day, with the aeroplanes overhead reporting the movements of all enemy troops and thereby rendering surprise

cautious enemy who may happen to risk his head above the parapet of his trench, the soldier falls back upon primitive devices.

of his first moves was to become an inglorious sort of grenadier, heir to a weapon that was born about the middle of the seventeenth century and that was used with great efect on the open line of battle in those

FIRING A LIGHT ROCKET

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THE ARMORED SHIELD IN MODERN USE

To protect the men who serve machine guns; a modern analogy of the Roman "testudo," which protected the men who swung a battering ram

and later days of short range flint-locks, wheel-locks, and blunderbusses the good old days when our forefathers on Concord Common were commanded to wait to see the whites of the enemy's eyes before they fired. Military opinion threw them overboard, however, in the nineteenth century, with the development of long-range rifles of the class of the Springfields, Lee-Canfields, Mausers, and Sniders, that were perfectly accurate up to 1,000 yards. The Russian - Japanese War, however the war in which many lessons were learned that are being practised in this war-revived the grenade. The English

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THE REVIVAL OF THE STEEL HELMET French soldiers wearing head armor of a pattern almost identical with that of helmets worn in England after the Norman conquest. They are highly efficient in deflecting rifle bullets and shrapnel bullets

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especially took up again the fruit-shaped weapon (its English name comes from the French word for pomegranate). The Hale grenade is a really formidable missile. It is a small cylindrical case of metal filled with a high explosive which is fired by a detonator, with tail attached to the case to steady it in its flight. The upper part of the case is a steel ring serrated into twentyfour sections so that, upon explosion, the ring will split into small particles that fly in all directions. Pit tests have proved that sometimes a grenade

will burst into as

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may either be fired The German "flammenwerfer" utilizes almost exactly the same ingredients as

the Greeks used in "Greek fire" in the defense of Constantinople in 1453

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THE DEFENSE AGAINST MODERN "STINK-POTS" The purpose of modern German asphyxiating gas and medieval Chinese stink-pots is the same to confuse and overpower the enemy so that an attack can be made upon him before he recovers

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Aeroplanes have supplanted cavalrymen on the western front of the Great War, both for scouting and for offensive actions that require speed rather than a large force. They have done very effective work in destroying supply depots with bombs

from a rifle or thrown by hand. The tail may be slipped in a rifle barrel and the grenade discharged by means of a blank cartridge. Fired in this way at an angle of thirty degrees, it will carry about 450 feet. With a heavier charge of powder and with the rifle more securely braced, double that range is possible. For shorter ranges, the grenades are held by the tail and thrown by hand. However thrown, they are one of the deadliest of missiles. They not only have the searching effect of shrapnel upon an enemy's trench, but the fragments are given a much greater velocity than are the bullets of a shrapnel shell. Furthermore, the high explosive charge detonates with extraordinary force a force oftentimes great enough to wreck a trench and to blow its nearest occupant literally to atoms. A soldier in the trenches can easily carry six or eight of the grenades slung in his belt or in a bag hanging from his waist.

There are in use by the Allies

and the Germans perhaps half a dozen other types of bombs, most of them exploded by a fuse instead of a detonator, and varying not in principle but in details of shape, size, charge, and effectiveness. One of the most popular is a home-made, or rather trench-made, bomb, improvised from a tin can and a charge of guncotton, and fired from a catapult made of an automobile spring mounted on a log of wood.

Here warfare has indeed gone back to ancient models for its instruments. The catapult is one of the oldest "engines

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Copyright by International News Service

AERIAL BOMBS

of war"-it was described by the author of the Book of Chronicles when he told how Uzziah, ruling in Jerusalem, supplied his army with military implements, including "engines, invented by cunning men, to be shot on the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones." The Greeks and Romans used them; Philip of Macedon employed them at the siege of Byzantium 340 years B.C. Practic

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ally the identical weapons are in use in the trenches in Flanders to-day. They consist substantially of a trough, corresponding to the barrel of a cannon, a heavy bowstring, a spring mechanism to work against the pull of the string, and give the propelling force a ratchet and windlass device to wind the bow-string taut, and a trigger to release the string for the throw. A light catapult in Roman times could throw a one half-pound arrow 400 yards; a heavy "ballista" had no greater range, but it could throw weights up to ninety pounds. Both this range and this weight limit are greater than are needed for bomb-throwing as it is practised to-day in the trenches.

The Germans improved on the catapult by the invention of the minenwerfer. This is a small trench cannon that fires a spherical bomb much after the fashion in which the Hale grenade is fired from a common rifle. It proved to be relatively ineffective in use because the missile often fell short and back-fired with disastrous effects to the Germans themselves.

The minenwerfer is, indeed, only an intermediate step between the rifle and the true trench mortar. Weapons of this latter class have been used throughout the war, on both fronts, with good effect. They are real mortars, with an extremely short barrel set at a high angle and using a small charge of powder. Different patterns are designed for spherical and cylindrical shells, and for weights of shell varying from thirty to seventy pounds. These shells are charged with high explosive, and as they fall into the enemy's trench almost vertically they are very effective missiles.

THE REVIVAL OF "GREEK FIRE"

British newspapers speak indignantly of the liquid fire thrown on their trenches by the Germans as an evidence of the infernal ingenuity of the chemist united with the soulless cruelty of a barbaric soldiery. Its cruel character speaks for itself; nothing, however, could be more erroneous historically than to imagine that the idea is new. "At the siege of Delium (424 B.C.), a cauldron containing pitch, sulphur, and burning charcoal was placed against the walls and urged into flame by the aid of a bellows, the blast from which

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was conveyed through a hollow tree trunk." A Roman, nearly eight hundred years later, A.D. 350, added naphtha to the recipe for "Greek fire" and came very close to the composition now used in the German flammenwerfer, which sprays out on the enemy's trenches, following it with a spray of living flame. The flammenwerfer, or flame projector, consists of a reservoir containing gasolene mixed with a small proportion of kerosene to give it body, a cylinder of highly compressed air, a pressure gauge, a starting valve, and an electric battery with induction coil. piece of flexible tubing connects the reservoir with a spraying tube which can be pointed at any angle. Two electric wires run to the end of the spraying tube, with a spark-gap between their ends. When the apparatus is operated, the compressed air forces out the gasolene under high pressure, and the sparker ignites it. The flame projector can throw its stream of fire about ninety feet. Its use gained for the Germans temporary possession of some British trenches north and south of Hooge in Belgium, and it has been used in other parts of the line, notably in the Argonne region; but it seems not to have been so widely nor so effectively employed as bombs and grenades have been.

THE USE OF GASES

The asphyxiating gas that the Germans used with such deadly effect at "Hill 60," near Ypres, last May does seem to be a novelty of warfare. The French, however, have since used an asphyxiating but not poisonous gas which is analogous to the stink-pots which the Chinese long used to overcome their enemies by pungent odors until a rush attack on them could be made. The French gas causes coughing and an intense smarting of the eyes and the tissues of the nose, but it leaves no evil aftereffects. The German gas, on the other hand, is deadly when inhaled in large quantities. Hundreds of British soldiers were killed by it in the fighting around Ypres. This gas is the product of the volatilization of liquid sulphurous acid and liquified chlorine, a process that disengages enormous quantities of vapor. This vapor, being heavier than air, settles

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