Bisbee daily review., 1918-09-22

extends back of the gun from the
 wheels down to the ground From the
 earliest days of gunnery this trailer
 has been a single piece. But the
 Americans have split it in two from the ground up, so that two great legs
 spread out backward from a cannon.
 The results have been astonishing, permitting an ordinary field piece to
 be elevated to so degrees, or almost straight up.
 The American design has now been adopted as the standard French mod el, and it is going into all the new guns made at French arsenals. Off cial photographs made by the ord nance branch are now going forward for public exhibition in America show ing this split trailer firing at an ele- vation of 73.4O degrees.
 Here could be seen also every form of the death-dealing machine gun which became such a formidable wea- pon in the present war.
 This is an age of mechanical war fare" said the officer as he pointed out the different types, French, English and American, as well as German and Austrian. There were no machine guns used in the Civil war; only a few in the Spanish-American and Boer wars: more in the RussO-Japanese and Balkan wars, and now they have developed to a foremost place as an effective and deadly means of war fare"
 Most of the nations are making two forms of these machine guns, the heavy type weighing about 30 pounds, mounted on a tripod and drawn by a mule, and the lighter automatic rifle, weighing about 15 pounds, fired from the shoulder like an ordinary rifle, and carried by hand, as it is not much heavier than the standard 10-pOund rifle. BOtR types of these guns fire steady streams of lead. as the belts of bullets are fed into the reservoirs, the only limit being the amount of ammunition which can be carried. With each automatic rifle are three men, one to fire and two to keep up the steady feeding of ammunition.
 The new type of American machine gun makes a favorable appearance in this array of makes from all the na- tions. It is coming over in large quan- titles now, and most of the American divisions now arriving come with their machine gun sections equipped with the new American model. At the training camps the tests have given the best results, but the real test of battle acion is still to come, as most of the divisions on the fighting line obtained their machine gun equipment before the new model was ready.
 In this same arsenal one could con- pare the rifles and bayOnets of all the troops. The American bay onet looked like a long, sharp-edged knife. But the French bayOnet was more like a slender napier, two feet long and without cutting edge, meant for stabbing The Russian bayonet has no sharp point, but is like a screw driver with a flat edge, cutting and stabbing at the same time
 And besides the guns of all kinds is the ammunition stored in vast quan titles in arsenals and warehouses and in huge parks and ammunition dumps all the way from the coast up to the fighting front The great stacks of shells are very orderly in arrange ment, each stack representing a car load, and each graded by caliber and lot number Each lot of shells differs slightly in power, and the only way to insure uniform accuracy in the fire of a battery is to keep it supplied with the same lot of shells.
 Separate from the shells, are the fuses and grenades, kept in small de- tached lots. owing to their highly eX- plosive character. In one of these grenade dumps there were IS differ ent kinds of gas. hand and rifle gren- ades.