battery had a dug-out for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for
their bed, right between two gun-emplacements.

"We found the mother wild, out there in the woods," one of the men
explained. "She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home
destroyed by shell-fire. At first she wouldn't let us approach her, and
we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups
will bring us luck. We'll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots,
eh?"

On our way back to the general's headquarters we must have passed
other batteries hidden from sight only a stone's throw away; and yet in
an illustrated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced
on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy, but
engaged in destroying all the enemy's batteries, according to the
account. Twelve months of war have not shaken conventional ideas
about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.

Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in
answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station.
They had shelled a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we
passed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower,
and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth
about the pavement. A shopkeeper was engaged in repairing a
window-frame that had been broken by a shell-fragment.

There is no flustering the French population. That very day I heard of
an old peasant who asked a British soldier if he could not get
permission for the old farmer to wear some kind of an armband which
both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat
between the trenches. Why not? Wasn't it his wheat? Didn't he need
the crop?

And the Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and
children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in
the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are
women and children. So British gunners avoid towns--which is, in one
sense, a professional handicap.

XVIII
Archibald The Archer

There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves
a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field
piece; the flight of the shell makes the same kind of sound. But its
scream, instead of passing in a long parabola toward the German
lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your
hand against the light blue