uppose.

"You called on him, I think--up on the Pimple. Major Normabell, D.S.O."

That was how I learned the name of the imperturbable major with whom
I had smoked a pipe on the crest of Vimy Ridge. I shall always
remember his name and him. I saw no man in France who made a livelier
impression upon my mind and my imagination.

"Aye," I said. "I remember. So that's his name--Normabell, D.S.O.
I'll make a note of that."

My informant smiled.

"Normabell's one of our characters," he said. "Well, you see he
commands a goodish bit of country there where he sits. And when he
needs them he has aircraft observations to help him, too. He's our
pair of eyes. We're like moles down here, we gunners--but he does all
our seeing for us. And he's in constant communication--he or one of
his officers."

I wondered where all the shells the battery was firing were headed
for. And I learned that just then it was paying its respects
particularly to a big factory building just west of Lens. For some
reason that had been marked for destruction, but it had been
reinforced and strengthened so that it was taking a lot of smashing
and standing a good deal more punishment than anyone had thought it
could--which was reason enough, in itself, to stick to the job until
that factory was nothing more than a heap of dust and ruins.

The way the guns kept pounding away at it made me think of firemen in
a small town drenching a local blaze with their hose. The gunners
were just so eager as that. And I could almost see that factory,
crumbling away. Major Normabell had pointed it out to me, up on the
ridge, and now I knew why. I'll venture to say that before night the
eight-inch howitzers of that battery had utterly demolished it, and
so ended whatever usefulness it had had for the Germans.

It was cruel business to be knocking the towns and factories of our
ally, France, to bits in the fashion that we were doing that day--
there and at many another point along the front. The Huns are fond of
saying that much of the destruction in Northern France has been the
work of allied artillery. True enough--but who made that inevitable
And it was not our guns that laid waste a whole countryside before
the German retreat in the spring of 1917, when the Huns ran wild,
rooting up fruit trees, cutting down every other tree that could be
found, and doing every other sort of wanton damage and mischief their
hands could find to do.

"Hard lines," said the battery