id not need
to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for that shooting,
who was in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He
was the high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a
gunner unless you are. Any "good-enough" temperament is ruled off
wasting munitions. Red was creeping through the tan from his throat
to the roots of his hair. To have this happen in the presence of that
veteran general, after all his efforts to try to remedy the error in those
guns!

But the general was quite human. He was not the "strafing" kind.

"I know those guns have an error!" he said, as he put his hand on the
officer's arm. That was all; and that was a good deal to the officer.
Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men. The officer
had suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride.

Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep
any general from being downhearted. Neither guns, nor the powder
which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the
gunners, nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the
first one, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from
the target. "Right on!"

And again and again--right on! The ugly, spreading, low-hanging,
dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the
same place. If the aeroplane's conclusions were right, that wireless
station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for
the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.

"Here, they are firing more than six!" said the general. "It's always
hard to hold these gunners down when they are on the target like
that."

He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the
temptation himself. The wireless station got two extra shells for full
measure. Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had
been enough. Conservation of shells has become a first principle of
the artillerists' duty. The number fired by either side in the course of
the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising.
Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a shell into a gun-
breech. The men in the trenches are always calling for shells. They
want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked
down. The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but
the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.

"The Boches will be coming b