they went
through the movements of loading, sighting and firing the guns. It was
easy to see why French artillery has won its renown. The training of
the French artilleryman is twice as severe as that of the infantryman.
Each man, in addition to knowing his own work on the gun, must be able
to do the work of all the eleven others. Casualties must occur, and in
spite of them the work of the gun must go on.

Casualties had occurred at that station. More than half the original
battery was gone. The little shelter house was splintered in a hundred
places. There were shell holes throughout the field, and the breech of
one gun had recently been shattered and was undergoing repair.

The drill was over and the gunners stood at attention. I asked
permission to photograph the battery, and it was cheerfully given. One
after the other I took the guns, until I had taken four. The gunners
waited smilingly expectant. For the last gun I found I had no film,
but I could not let it go at that. So I pointed the empty camera at it
and snapped the shutter. It would never do to show discrimination.

Somewhere in London are all those pictures. They have never been sent
to me. No doubt a watchful English government pounced on them in the
mail, and, in connection with my name, based on them most unjust
suspicions. They were very interesting. There was Captain Mignot, and
the two imposing officers from General Foch's staff; there were
smiling young French gunners; there was the telemeter, which cost,
they told me, ten thousand francs, and surely deserved to have its
picture taken, and there was one, not too steady, of a patch of sunny
sky and a balloon-shaped white cloud, where another German shrapnel
had burst overhead.

The drill was over. We went back along the path toward the road.
Behind the storehouse the evening meal was preparing in a shed. The
battery was to have a new ration that night for a change, bacon and
codfish. Potatoes were being pared into a great kettle and there was a
bowl of eggs on a stand. It appeared to me, accustomed to the meagre
ration of the Belgians, that the French were dining well that night on
the plains of Ypres.

In a stable near at hand a horse whinnied. I patted him as I passed,
and he put his head against my shoulder.

"He recognises you!" said Captain Boisseau. "He too is American."

It was late afternoon by that time. The plan to reach the advanced
trenches was frustrated by an increasing fusillade