ience with German high
explosives. Their expert knowledge of all the ins and outs of the
business had been fought into them for over a year.

Another field battery, also, I have in mind, placed in an orchard.
Which orchard of all the thousands of orchards along the British front
the German staff may guess, if they choose. If German guns fired at
all the orchards, one by one, they might locate it--and then again they
might not. Besides, this is a peculiar sort of orchard.

It is a characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the
comeliness of things. These men had a lawn and a garden, tables
and chairs. If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New
England sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies
forth to remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then
you know how scrupulous they were about litter.

For weeks they had been in the same position, unseen by German
aeroplanes. They had daily baths; they did their weekly laundry,
taking care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky. Every
day they received the London papers and letters from home. When
they were needed to help in making war, all they had to do was to slip
a shell in the breech and send it with their compliments to the
Germans. They were camping out at His Majesty's expense in the
pleasant land of France in the joyous summer time; and on the roof of
sod over their guns were pots of flowers, undisturbed by blasts from
the gun-muzzles.

It was when leaving another battery that out of the tail of my eye I
caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp, ear-
piercing crack that comes from being in line with a gun-muzzle when
a shot is fired. We followed a path which took us to the rear of the
report, where we stepped through undergrowth among the busy
group around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger
calibres.

An order for some "heavy stuff" at a certain point on the map was
being filled. Sturdy men were moving in a pantomime under the
shade of a willow tree, each doing exactly his part in a process that
seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package
of concentrated destruction, and closing the door. All that detail of
range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen
target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as
an adding-machine adds up a column of figures. Everybody was as
practice-perfect in his part as perform