yards distance have dug another sector and decorated it
realistically with barbed-wire entanglements. Thither one afternoon we
conveyed the mortar to the first trenches on an improvised carriage,
placed it behind one of the traverses, and duly clamped it down. The
subaltern took up a periscope and got the thread-line on the target--you
find the range without instruments and by your own intuitions. "Three
hundred, I think," he remarked pensively. A pupil adjusted the range
indicator at 71.30 to get the elevation, and his assistant took up what
looked like a huge jar of preserved ginger. It was the bomb. Having put
the tail to it he inserted the detonator. "Fuse at 27." He set the
indicator with as much care as if he were setting the hands of his
watch. The man took the fuse delicately, put in the test-tube and
attached the lanyard. These operations had been closely followed by the
class, who made a circle round the bomb like a football "scrum." It was
now time to line the trenches, for the "tail" of the bomb is apt to kick
viciously when the thing is fired. As they spread out, the man removed
the two safety-pins in the top of the fuse and pulled the lanyard. There
was a voice of thunder and a sheet of flame, followed by what seemed an
interminable pause. We scanned the brown furrows in front of us and
suddenly the earth shot skywards in a fan; a cloud of dirty-black smoke
floated over our target. The whole class leapt the parapet and streamed
away across the furrows like a pack of hounds in full cry, until they
suddenly disappeared below the surface of the earth. We followed and
found them standing in a huge crater whose sides were hollowed out as
neatly as those of a cup. "Done it again," said the subaltern
complacently, "we've never had a blind."

At the Machine-gun School they do things on a larger scale, and Wren's
could teach them nothing in the art of cramming. The Instructor reckons
to put his class of 200 officers and men through a six months' course in
a fortnight. There is need for it. The Germans started this war with
eleven machine-guns (it is now anything from twenty to forty) to a
battalion. We started with two. For years they have enlisted, trained,
and paid a special class of men to man them. Consequently we had a great
deal of leeway to make up. We are making it up, hand over fist, thanks
to the Instructor, one of the most brilliant and devoted officers I
know, and a man who spends his nights in inventin