guns of his side whether they are on the
target or not.

Riding along the roads at the front one may know that there is a
battery a stone's throw away only when a blast from a hidden gun-
muzzle warns him of its presence. It is wonderful to me that the
artillery general who took me gun-seeing knew where his own guns
were, let alone the enemy's. I imagine that he could return to a field
and locate a four-leafed clover that he had seen on a previous stroll.
His dogs of war had become foxes of war, burrowing in places which
wise old father foxes knew were safest from detection. Hereafter, I
shall not be surprised to see a muzzle poking its head out of an oven,
or from under grandfather's chair or a farm wagon, or up a tree, or in
a garret. Think of the last place in the world for emplacing a gun and
one may be there; think of the most likely place and one may be
there. You might be walking across the fields and minded to go
through a hedge, and bump into a black ring of steel with a gun's
crew grinning behind it. They would grin because you had given proof
of how well their gun was concealed. But they wouldn't grin as much
as they would if they saw the enemy plunking shells into another
hedge two hundred yards distant, where the German aeroplane
observer thought he had seen a battery and had not.

"I'll show you a big one, first!" said the general.

We left the car at a cottage and walked along a lane. I looked all
about the premises and could see only some artillerymen. An officer
led me up to a gun-breech; at least, I know a gun-breech when it is
one foot from my nose and a soldier has removed its covering. But I
shall not tell how that gun was concealed; the method was so
audacious that it was entirely successful. The Germans would like to
know and we don't want them to know. A little pencil-point on their
map for identification, and they would send a whirlwind of shells at
that gun.

And then?

Would the gun try to fire back? No. Its gunners probably would not
know the location of any of the guns of the German battery which had
concentrated on their treasure. They would desert the gun. If they did
not, they ought to be court-martialled for needlessly risking the
precious lives of trained men. They would make for the "funk-pits," as
they call the dug-outs, just as the gunners of any other Power would.

The chances are that the gun itself would not be hit bodily by a shell.
Fragments might strike it without causi