nt landscape I thought of the Pilgrim's vision of
the Golden City shining in the sun beyond the Land of Beulah. Two or
three miles away on our right the ground rose gently to a range of low
wooded hills, and on their bare green slopes brown furrows showed up
like a cicatrice. They were the German trenches. On the crest of the
ridge a white house peeped out between the trees. That house seemed an
object of peculiar interest to the battery-major at my side. He was
stooping behind the "Director" with his eye to the sights as though he
was focussing the distant object for a photograph. He fixed the outer
clamp, unscrewed the inner clamp, and having got his sights on the
house, he reversed the process and swung round the sights to bear on a
little copse to our left. "One hundred and five," he said meditatively
as he found the angle. The N.C.O. took up the range-finder and measured
the distances first to the house, then to the copse. The major took up
an adjustable triangle, and with a movement of thumb and forefinger
converted it into the figure of an irregular "X." As he read off the
battery angle on the "Plotter" the N.C.O. communicated it and the
elevation to the telephone operator, who in turn communicated it to the
battery in the copse. "Battery angle seventy. Range four thousand."
Gunners are a laconic people, and their language is as economical of
words as a proposition in Euclid; their sentences resemble those
Oriental languages in which the verb is regarded as a superfluous
impertinence. Language is to them a visual and symbolical thing in which
angles and distances are predicated of churches, trees, and four-storied
houses. Now in the copse on our left six field-guns were cunningly
concealed, and even as the telephone operator spoke the dial-sights of
those six guns were being screwed round and the elevating gear adjusted
till they and the range-drum recorded the results of the major's
meditations upon the hill. Then the guns in the copse spoke, and the air
was sibilant with their speech. A little cloud no bigger than a man's
hand arose above the roof of the white house on the ridge. Our battery
had found its mark.

Somewhere behind that ridge were the enemy's batteries and they were
yet to find. But even as we searched the landscape with our
field-glasses an aeroplane rose from behind our own position and made
for the distant ridge, its diaphanous wings displaying red, white, and
blue concentric circles to our gla