First, there is the Italian one-pounder firing ballistite. It is absolutely useless. Its snapping shells are so small that you can thrust them in your pocket without noticing them. This gun is merely a plaything. And yet being the best we have, it is wheeled unendingly around and fired at the enemy from a dozen different points. It may give confidence, but that is all it can give. The other day I watched it at work on a heavy barricade being constructed by night and day by the methodical enemy. By night the Chinese soldiery work as openly as they please, for no outpost may waste its ammunition by indiscriminate shooting. But during the day, orders or no orders, it has become rash for the enemy to expose himself to our view; and even the fleeting glimpse of a moving hand is made the excuse for a hailstorm of fire. This has made excessive caution the order of the day, and you can almost believe, when no rifles are firing to disturb such a conviction, that there are only dead men round us. Yet with nothing to be seen, countless hands are at work; in spite of the greatest vigilance barricades and barriers grow up nearer and nearer to us both night and day; we are being tied in tighter. These mysterious barricades, built in parallels, are so cunningly constructed that our fiercest sorties must in the end beat themselves to pieces against brick and stone; if the enemy can complete his plans we shall be choked silently. That is why the Italian gun is so often requisitioned. I was saying that I watched the one-pounder at work against the enemy's brick-bound lines. Each time, as ammunition is becoming precious, the gun was more carefully sighted and fired, and each time, with a little crash, the baby shell shot through the barricades, boring a ragged hole six or eight inches in diameter. Two or three times this might always be accomplished with everything on the Chinese side silent as death. The cunning enemy! Then suddenly, as the gun was shifted a bit to continue the work of ripping up that barricade, attention would be distracted, and before you could explain it the ragged holes would be no more. Unseen hands had repaired the damage by pushing up dozens of bricks and sandbags, and before the game could be opened again, unseen rifles were rolling off in their dozens and tearing the crests of our outworks. In that storm of brick-chips, split sandbags and dented nickel, you could not move or reply. That is the Italian gun. The next most useful weapon should be the Austrian machine-gun, which is a very modern weapon, and throws Mannlicher bullets at the rate of six hundred to the minute. Yet it, too, is practically useless. It has been tried everywhere and found to be defective. When it rattles at full speed, it has been seen that its sighting is illusory--that it throws erratically high in the air, and that ammunition is simply wasted. It cannot help us in the slightest. The value of machine-guns has been always overrated.