The railroad artillery comprises huge guns pulled on railways by
locomotives, each gun having a number of cars as part of its equipment.
These are slow-firing guns of great power and hurling the largest
projectiles known to warfare. The largest guns of this class were
produced by American inventive genius as a reply to the German gun of
St. Gobain Forest. This was a weapon which hurled a nine-inch shell from
a distance of sixty-two miles into the heart of Paris. The damage done
by it was comparatively slight and it had no appreciable effect upon the
morale of the Parisians.
Its greatest damage was when it struck the Roman Catholic Church of St.
Gervais on Good Friday, March 29, 1918, killing seventy-five persons and
wounding ninety. Fifty-four of those killed were women, five being
Americans. The total effect of the bombardment by this big gun was to
arouse France, England and America to a fiercer fighting pitch. The late
Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York, expressed this sentiment, when
he sent the following message to the Archbishop of Paris:
Shocked by the brutal killing of innocent victims gathered at religious
services to commemorate the passing of our blessed Saviour on Good
Friday, the Catholics of New York join your noble protest against this
outrage of the sanctuary on such a day and at such an hour and,
expressing their sympathy to the bereaved relatives of the dead and
injured, pledge their unfaltering allegiance in support of the common
cause that unites our two great republics.
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