Page 2013 - les-miserables

the fist. The army is reaching out its big paw to us. The bar-
ricade is going to be severely shaken up. The fusillade tries,
the cannon takes.’
‘It is a piece of eight, new model, brass,’ added Combeferre.
‘Those pieces are liable to burst as soon as the proportion of
ten parts of tin to one hundred of brass is exceeded. The ex-
cess of tin renders them too tender. Then it comes to pass
that they have caves and chambers when looked at from the
vent hole. In order to obviate this danger, and to render it
possible to force the charge, it may become necessary to re-
turn to the process of the fourteenth century, hooping, and
to encircle the piece on the outside with a series of unwelded
steel bands, from the breech to the trunnions. In the mean-
time, they remedy this defect as best they may; they manage
to discover where the holes are located in the vent of a can-
non, by means of a searcher. But there is a better method,
with Gribeauval’s movable star.’
‘In the sixteenth century,’ remarked Bossuet, ‘they used
to rifle cannon.’
‘Yes,’ replied Combeferre, ‘that augments the projectile
force, but diminishes the accuracy of the firing. In firing at
short range, the trajectory is not as rigid as could be desired,
the parabola is exaggerated, the line of the projectile is no
longer sufficiently rectilinear to allow of its striking inter-
vening objects, which is, nevertheless, a necessity of battle,
the importance of which increases with the proximity of the
enemy and the precipitation of the discharge. This defect of
the tension of the curve of the projectile in the rifled can-
non of the sixteenth century arose from the smallness of the

2013