aintest sound of his voice, could even see the quick flash and puffing
smoke of a grenade without catching the crash of its explosion. It was
not that he was too far off to hear all these sounds, but simply
because individually they were drowned in the continuous ear-filling
roar of the battle.

The struggle was keenly interesting and desperately exciting, even from
a spectator's point of view; and the interest and excitement were the
greater to the Forward Officer, because he was playing a part, and an
important part, in the great game spread before him. Beyond the line
of a section of the British front white smoke-puffs were constantly
bursting, over his head a succession of shells streamed rushing and
shrieking; and the place where each of those puffs burst depended on
him, each shell that roared overhead came in answer to his call. He
was 'observing' for a six-gun battery concealed behind a gentle slope
over a mile away to his right rear, and, since the gunners at the
battery could see nothing of the fight, nothing of their target, not
even the burst of a single one of their shells, they depended solely on
their Forward Officer to correct their aim and direct their fire.

All along the front--or rather both the fronts, for the German
batteries worked on exactly the same system--the batteries were pouring
down their shells, and each battery was dependent for the accuracy of
its fire on its own Observing Officer crouching somewhere up in front
and overlooking his battery's 'zone.'

The fighting line surged forward or swayed back, checked and halted,
moved again, now rapidly, now slowly and staggeringly, curved forward
here and dinted in there, striving fiercely to hold its ground in this
place, driving forward in that, or breaking, reeling back into the arms
of the supports, swirling forward with them again. But no matter
whether the lines moved forward or back, fast or slow, raggedly and
unevenly, or in one long close-locked line, ever and always the shells
soared over and burst beyond the line, just far enough barely to clear
it if the fight were at close quarters; reaching out and on a hundred,
two hundred, yards when the fighters drew apart for a moment; always
clear of their own infantry, and as exactly as possible on the fighting
line of the enemy, for such is the essence of 'close and accurate
artillery support.'

The Forward Observing Officer, perched precariously in an angle of the
walls of a ruined c