, in
his hands, as men could be in such a spot.

It was not more than a mile we had to cover, but it was rough going,
bad going. Here war had had its grim way without interruption. The
face of the earth had been cut to pieces. Its surface had been
smashed to a pulpy mass. The ground had been plowed, over and over,
by a rain of shells--German and British. What a planting there had
been that spring, and what a plowing! A harvest of death it had been
that had been sown--and the reaper had not waited for summer to come,
and the Harvest moon. He had passed that way with his scythe, and
where we passed now he had taken his terrible, his horrid, toll.

At the foot of the ridge I saw men fighting for the first time--
actually fighting, seeking to hurt an enemy. It was a Canadian
battery we saw, and it was firing, steadily and methodically, at the
Huns. Up to now I had seen only the vast industrial side of war, its
business and its labor. Now I was, for the first time, in touch with
actual fighting. I saw the guns belching death and destruction,
destined for men miles away. It was high angle fire, of course,
directed by observers in the air.

But even that seemed part of the sheer, factory-like industry of war.
There was no passion, no coming to grips in hot blood, here. Orders
were given by the battery commander and the other officers as the
foreman in a machine shop might give them. And the busy artillerymen
worked like laborers, too, clearing their guns after a salvo, loading
them, bringing up fresh supplies of ammunition. It was all
methodical, all a matter of routine.

"Good artillery work is like that," said Captain Godfrey, when I
spoke to him about it. "It's a science. It's all a matter of the
higher mathematics. Everything is worked out to half a dozen places
of decimals. We've eliminated chance and guesswork just as far as
possible from modern artillery actions."

But there was something about it all that was disappointing, at first
sight. It let you down a bit. Only the guns themselves kept up the
tradition. Only they were acting as they should, and showing a proper
passion and excitement. I could hear them growling ominously, like
dogs locked in their kennel when they would be loose and about, and
hunting. And then they would spit, angrily. They inflamed my
imagination, did those guns; they satisfied me and my old-fashioned
conception of war and fighting, more than anything else that I had
seen had done. And i