y
warm kind of messenger service when the German marmites were
falling their thickest."

At length he stopped before a small mound of earth not in any way
distinctive at a short distance on the uneven surface of the plateau. I
did not even notice that there were three other such mounds. He
pointed to a hole in the ground. I had been used to going through a
manhole in a battleship turret, but not through one into a field-gun
position before aeroplanes played a part in war.

"Entrez, monsieur!"

And I stepped down to face the breech of a gun whose muzzle
pointed out of another hole in the timbered roof covered with earth.

"It's very cosy!" I remarked.

"Oh, this is the shop! The living room is below--here!"

I descended a ladder into a cellar ten feet below the gun level, where
some of the gunners were lying on a thick carpet of perfectly dry
straw.

"You are not doing much firing these days?" I suggested.

"Oh, we gave the Boches a couple this morning so they shouldn't get
cocky thinking they were safe It's necessary to keep your hand in
even in the winter."

"Don't you get lonesome?"

"No, we shift on and off. We're not here all the while. It is quite warm
in our salon, monsieur, and we have good comrades. It is war. It is for
France. What would you?"

Four other gun-positions and four other cellars like this! Thousands of
gun-positions and thousands of cellars! Man invents new powers of
destruction and man finds a way of escaping them.

As we left the battery we started forward, and suddenly out of the
dusk came a sharp call. A young corporal confronted us. Who were
we and what business had we prowling about on that hill? If there had
been no officer along and I had not had a laisser-passer on my
person, the American Ambassador to France would probably have
had to get another countryman out of trouble.

The incident shows how thoroughly the army is policed and how
surely. Editors who wonder why their correspondents are not in the
front line catching bullets, please take notice.

It was dark when we returned to the little village on the plateau where
we had left the car. The place seemed uninhabited with all the blinds
closed. But through one uncovered window I saw a room full of
chatting soldiers. We went to pay our respects to the colonel in
command, and found him and his staff around a table covered with
oilcloth in the main living-room of a villager's house. He spoke of his
men, of their loyalty