It really was not until the war between Russia and Japan that military men began to realize the value of the machine-gun. As the war went on, both the Russians and the Japanese bought up all the machine-guns they could secure. They learned what could be done with the aid of barbed wire to retard the enemy while the machine-guns mowed them down as they were trying to get through. A man with a machine-gun is worth a hundred men with rifles; such is the military estimate of the weapon. The gun fires so fast that after hitting a man it will hit him again ten times while he is falling to the ground. And so it does not pay to fire the gun continuously in one direction, unless there is a dense mass of troops charging upon it. Usually the machine-gun is swept from side to side so as to cover as wide a range as possible. It is played upon the enemy as you would play the hose upon the lawn, scattering a shower of lead among the advancing hosts. MACHINE-GUN FORTS It used to be thought that the Belgian forts of armored steel and concrete, almost completely buried in the ground, would hold out against any artillery. But when the Germans brought up their great howitzers and hurled undreamed-of quantities of high explosives on these forts, they broke and crumbled to pieces. Then it was predicted that the day of the fort was over. But the machine-gun developed a new type of warfare. Instead of great forts, mounting huge guns, little machine-gun forts were built, and, they were far more troublesome than the big fellows. To the Germans belongs the credit for the new type of fort, which consisted of a small concrete structure, hidden from view as far as possible, but commanding some important part of the front. "Pill-boxes," the British call them, because the first ones they ran across were round in shape and something like a pill-box in appearance. These pill-boxes were just large enough to house a few men and a couple of machine-guns. Concealment was of the utmost importance; safety depended upon it. Airplanes were particularly feared, because a machine-gun emplacement was recognized to be so important that a whole battery of artillery would be turned upon a suspected pill-box. Some of the German machine-gun forts were very elaborate, consisting of spacious underground chambers where a large garrison of gunners could live. These forts were known as _Mebus_, a word made from the initials of "_Maschinengewehr Eisen-Bettungs Unterstand_," meaning a machine-gun iron-bedded foundation. It was the machine-gun that was responsible for the enormous expenditure of ammunition in the war. Before a body of troops dared to make a charge, the ground had to be thoroughly searched by the big guns for any machine-gun nests. Unless these were found and destroyed by shell-fire, the only way that remained to get the best of them was to crush them down with tanks. It was really the machine-gun that drove the armies into trenches and under the ground.