In Wednesday's Times will be found a longand interesting account
by a military correspondent of the exhibits of war material at the Paris Exhibition, and in particular those of the French firms of Schneider (whose works are at Creusot) and Hotchkiss, the English manufacturers Vickers-Maxim, and the Austrian company of Skoda. Taking the Vickers- Maxim exhibit first, the writer notes the breech action of the 12 in. gun, and the wonderfully ingenious "single-motion" breech mechanism of the 6 in. quick-firing gun. In the department of field artillery the best carriage—a combination of the hydraulic buffer and spade action—is the Darmancier- Dalzon, already supplied to the British Government, which works wonderfully well on a soft soil. The 75 mm. gun is shown, with the mounting used by the Boers at Elandslaagte and by us at Ladysmith. As regards the famous "Porn- Porn," the Times expert justifies to a certain extent the War Office criticism : "The results achieved in South Africa have been moral rather than actual. It was not until the weapon underwent the test of war that any one realised what its effect would be." He praises the exhibits of the Pilsen firm of Skoda, as of unsurpassed finish. Their 9.6 in. howitzer, the largest and most powerful example of modern siege ordnance, was taken by us up to Pretoria, and on one occa- sion fired against the enemy at a range of 9,000 yards. The Creueot Works exhibit is especially interesting from the number of guns shown identical in carriage and construction with those used against us by the Boers; the field-gun, how- ever, supplied to the Boers has already been superseded by
an improved model. The writer sums up by declaring that the Exhibition stands unrivalled for a general display of the most modern types of armament, and goes so far as to say that, as regards death-dealing weapons, the limit of inventive genius has already been reached.
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