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.
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