In the northern outskirts of the Forest of St. Gobain, a couple of miles from the village of Crépy, and about seven miles east of La Fère and the Oise, are to be found the remains of the emplacement (Plate 74) of the "Grosse Bertha," the gun which bombarded Paris from a distance of about seventy-four miles. On the spot we were told that there had been three guns, or at any rate three emplacements, but that the other emplacements were still more completely destroyed than the one which I have photographed. The guns and gun-carriages were, of course, removed by the Germans before we could reach them. We know, however, that the shell was about 8 inches in diameter and was fired from a large naval gun, probably similar to the gun captured at Chuignes (p. 45), lined up for the small shell. The stories that some mysterious new ballistics were involved in the matter were, of course, entirely "buncombe." But naturally the trajectory of a shell travelling more than seventy miles was a matter of interest to all artillerymen. It must have reached a height of something like five-and-twenty miles, and our knowledge of atmospheric conditions at that height is somewhat limited. The alignment of the gun, with the allowances for wind and drift, must have been very accurately calculated and carried out, for even the whole of Paris is not a large target under such exceptional circumstances. It will not be forgotten, as a characteristic piece of German mentality--or brutality--that this gun was used on Good Friday (the 29th of March, 1918), and a shell burst in a Paris church during service and killed many of the congregation. But the Parisians, after the first shock, were to be as little scared by Bertha as the Londoners by the Zepps. Crossing the Forest of St. Gobain--which had been continuously within the German lines--by the very worst stretches of road which I found anywhere, even in Flanders--I came across a German O.P. (Plate 75) in a tall tree. The forest itself is very fine, quite untouched by shell-fire, but the group of large, pleasant-looking country houses at St. Gobain itself have been much injured. Farther south reconstruction was in rapid progress. At the little manufacturing town of Chauny (half-way to Noyon) we found the odd condition of affairs that half the town had been entirely destroyed and the other half--the division was quite a sharp one--almost untouched.