Feeding "Grannie" - Shell hoisted into position

This is one of the largest cannon used by our army during the Great War, a wonderful piece of mechanism composed of many parts made and adjusted with the utmost care. The recoil, although absorbed by mechanical means, is so tremendous that the gun must be mounted upon a solid concrete floor covered with heavy planks. The shell weighs a thousand pounds, is hoisted by pulleys, and swung into the breech by a moving crane. America was unable to turn out guns of this type until the war was well under way, but the French and British provided them in large numbers, although until the great battle of the Somme, in 1916, the Germans, held the mastery in heavy artillery. For this battle, however, the British had been preparing for months, realizing that they would have to 1)last their way by sledge hammer blows through the supposedly impregnable defenses before them. Nothing built by man could withstand these tremendous shells ; caverns were even blown in the living rock ; dugouts disappeared in showers of earth and splintered timber. The crews of these great guns became very much attached to their ponderous pieces of artillery ; gave them pet names and lavished every care upon them ; took great pride in their capacity for destruction, and vied with each other in the number of "hits" that were made. The targets were mile s away, usually hidden by hills or mountains. The guns were aimed in accordance with mathematical calculations, the great shell describing an arc in the sky and dropping upon its target like a bolt from the blue