At the opening of the war two opposed theories of artillery effectiveness were held by the combatants. The French swore by the medium calibre, rapid-fire, low-trajectory field piece. The Teutons had devoted their best efforts to the development of guns so big that their opponents were tempted, before they learned better, to regard them as too unwieldy for effective field service. Both were right, the French in the full sense and intention of the term, the Teutons by pure accident. It should be explained here that the word Teuton is used advisedly, for in reality it is to the Austrians before the Germans that the development of the 11-inch and bigger field gun, with its special carriage and caterpillar-tread wheels owes its existence. It was Austrian guns and Austrian gunners that first made the heavy artillery of the Teuton armies famous. The French field piece performed all that was expected of it, but it was handicapped by unforeseen conditions of warfare. The heavy Teuton guns performed their mission in the very introductory stages of the war, then failed, and later, by the irony of fate, proved to be the very things required when the unforeseen war conditions developed. A WONDERFUL GUN. The Germans and Austrians believed that they could develop a big gun which could be given sufficient mobility for use in the field, and with commendable and methodical application they proceeded to do so. The theory was, first, that it could batter down any permanent fortifications that man could build, and when it was pitted against the concrete ramparts of Liege and Namur it blew them out of existence in a few hours. The Teutons had scored, and scored so heavily that the Allies barely escaped the fate the Germans had prepared for them in an overwhelming sweep on Paris. That they did escape this fate is no doubt in a large measure due to the fact that the second effectiveness claimed by the Teutons for their heavy ordnance failed in its full accomplishment. Used in open fighting, the great explosive shells hurled by these guns did not do the damage expected to the wide, open firing lines of the Allies, nor did they produce the moral effect expected. The great shells tore tremendous craters in the ground, from which the force of the explosion was expended upward in a sort of cone-shape, shooting above the heads of any troops in the vicinity except those immediately adjacent to the explosion. In the meantime the field pieces of the French, with their extreme mobility and rapidity of fire, were scattering death and destruction with their straight shrapnel fire in the solid formations which were so popular with the Germans in the early stages of the war, and which today they do not seem to be able to drop entirely.