Finally, yet foremost, we were invited to inspect that thing which is the pride and the brag of this particular arm of the German Army--a balloon-cannon, so called.
The balloon-gun of this size is--or was at the date when I saw it--an exclusively German institution.

I believe the Allies have balloon-guns too, but theirs are smaller, according to what the Germans say.

This one was mounted on a squatty half-turret at the tail end of an armored- steel truck.

It had a mechanism as daintily adjusted as a lady's watch and much more accurate, and when being towed by its attendant automobile, which has harnessed within it the power of a hundred and odd draft horses, it has been known to cover sixty English miles in an hour, for all that its weight is that of very many loaded vans.
The person in authority here was a youthful and blithe lieutenant--an Iron Cross man--with pale, shallow blue eyes and a head of bright blond hair.

He spun one small wheel to show how his pet's steel nose might be elevated almost straight upward; then turned another to show how the gun might be swung, as on a pivot, this way and that to command the range of the entire horizon, and he concluded the performance, with the aid of several husky lads in begrimed gray, by going through the pantomime of loading with a long yellow five-inch shell from the magazine behind him, and pretending to fire, meanwhile explaining that he could send one shot aloft every six seconds and with each shot reach a maximum altitude of between seven and eight thousand feet.