commander. He shrugged his shoulders.
"No use trying to spare shells here, though, even on French towns.
The harder we smash them the sooner it'll be over. Look here, sir."

He pointed out the men who sat, their telephone receivers strapped
over their ears. Each served a gun. In all that hideous din it was of
the utmost importance that they should hear correctly every word and
figure that came to them over the wire--a part of that marvelously
complete telephone and telegraph system that has been built for and
by the British army in France.

"They get corrections on every shot," he told me. "The guns are
altered in elevation according to what they hear. The range is
changed, and the pointing, too. We never see old Fritz--but we know
he's getting the visiting cards we send him."

They were amazingly calm, those laddies at the telephones. In all
that hideous, never-ending din, they never grew excited. Their voices
were calm and steady as they repeated the orders that came to them. I
have seen girls at hotel switchboards, expert operators, working with
conditions made to their order, who grew infinitely more excited at a
busy time, when many calls were coming in and going out. Those men
might have been at home, talking to a friend of their plans for an
evening's diversion, for all the nervousness or fussiness they showed.

Up there, on the Pimple, I had seen Normabell, the eyes of the
battery. Here I was watching its ears. And, to finish the metaphor,
to work it out, I was listening to its voice. Its brazen tongues were
giving voice continually. The guns--after all, everything else led up
to them. They were the reason for all the rest of the machinery of
the battery, and it was they who said the last short word.

There was a good deal of rough joking and laughter in the battery.
The Canadian gunners took their task lightly enough, though their
work was of the hardest--and of the most dangerous, too. But jokes
ran from group to group, from gun to gun. They were constantly
kidding one another, as an American would say, I think. If a
correction came for one gun that showed there had been a mistake in
sighting after the last orders--if, that is, the gunners, and not the
distant observers, were plainly at fault--there would be a
good-natured outburst of chaffing from all the others.

But, though such a spirit of lightness prevailed, there was not a
moment of loafing. These men were engaged in a grim, deadly task,
and eve