al they
had qualified; and sometimes newcomers shoot quite as well as
veterans, which is a surprise to both and the best kind of news for the
general who is in charge of an expanding plant. The war will be
decided by gunners and infantry that knew nothing of guns or drill
when the war began.

"Here are some who have been in France from the first," said the
general, when we came to a battery of field guns; of the eighteen-
pounders, the fellows you see behind the galloping horses, the "hell-
for-leather" guns, the guns which bring the gleam of affection into the
eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the
pitched-battle conditions before armies settled down in trenches and
growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns
of calibres which we associate with battleships and coast
fortifications.

These are called "light stuff" and "whizz-bangs" now, in army
parlance. They throw only an eighteen-pound shell which carries
three hundred bullets, but so fast that they chase one another
through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of
heavy guns, you might think that eighteen-pounders were too small
for consideration. Were the German line broken, these are the ones
which could gallop on the heels of the infantry.

They are the boys who weave the "curtain of fire" which you read
about in the official bulletins as checking an infantry charge; which
demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get
into a trench. If a general wants a shower of bullets over any part of
the German line he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders and it is
sent as promptly as the pressure of a button brings a pitcher of iced-
water to a room in a first-class hotel. A veteran eighteen-pounder
crew in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement. The
gun itself seems to possess intelligence.

There was the finesse of gunners' craft worthy of veterans in the way
that these eighteen-pounders were concealed. The Germans had put
some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands.
They did not change the location of their battery and their judgment
that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another
object was justified. Particularly I should like to mention the nature of
their "funk-pits," which kept them safe from the heaviest shells. For
the veterans knew how to take care of themselves; they had an eye
to the protection which comes of exper