These leading citizens strut before you and fill you full of fierce and splendid talk about becoming “brave boys behind the gun”; but at the same time they despise you socially. Don’t foolishly get _behind_ the gun or in _front_ of the gun—not at least till you have studied the gun. A high-grade modern rifle can be fired twenty-five times per minute. This gun will pierce 60 pine boards each one inch thick. It will kill a man at a distance of four miles. A bullet with sufficient force to pierce a one-inch pine board will kill a man or a horse. Actual tests show that the best modern rifles will force a bullet through a target made of the following combination:—fifteen folds of cow-hide, sixteen one-inch pine boards, and one and four-fifths inches of hard beech wood. Bullets fired from rifles used in the American Civil War would do little damage after passing into or through the bodies of soldiers in the front ranks. Men in the second and third ranks felt much protected by the bodies of men in front of them. ALL IS DIFFERENT NOW. The best modern rifles will force a bullet through five horses at 27 yards; four horses at 220 yards; two horses at 1,100 yards. Even as recently as the war of 1870–71 and the war of 1877–78, bullets from rifles then used in the German army would not pierce a human skull at a distance of 1,760 yards, one mile; but with the best modern rifles bullets can be fired through the thick bones of an ox at a range of 3,850 yards, about two and one-fifth miles. Experiments demonstrate that the best modern rifles will force a bullet through three human bodies at a range of 3,900 feet; and through five human bodies at 1,200 feet. In the American Civil War bullets for long range work had to be fired high, describing a long high arch, thus missing all objects on the battlefield between the gun and the object aimed at. A bullet from a modern rifle will fly straight across the field for hundreds of yards with no elevation, even half a mile and more with but little elevation, sweeping the whole width of the field between the gun and the target.[71] The deadliness of the modern rifle can be made clear in another way. Says Bloch: “According to the data of the Prussian general Rohne one hundred sharp-shooters will put a battery out of action, firing at a distance of 88 yards in the course of two and two-fifths minutes, 1,100 yards in the course of four minutes, 1,320 yards in the course of seven and a half minutes, 1,650 yards in the course of twenty-two minutes.” “The new Springfield rifle,” says Fitzmorris,[72] “has a range of five miles, the bullet having a velocity of 2,300 feet per second leaving the weapon, or sufficient to drive it through four and a half feet of white pine.”