The Germans, by this time, had hauled into Belgium the weapons that would decide the fate of Liège, two new kinds of monster artillery: 305mm Skoda siege mortars borrowed from Austria, plus an almost unimaginably huge 420mm howitzer secretly developed and produced by Germany’s Krupp steelworks. Neither gun had ever been used in combat. The bigger of the two weighed seventy-five tons and had to be transported by rail in five sections and set in concrete before going into action.
