emy's dispositions. He
will do it, too, if he gets a chance!

The machine-gunners, also, contrive to chase monotony by methods
of their own. Listen to Ayling, concocting his diurnal scheme
of frightfulness with a colleague. Unrolled upon his knee is a
large-scale map.

"I think we might touch up those cross-roads to-night," he says,
laying the point of his dividers upon a spot situated some hundreds of
yards in rear of the German trenches.

"I expect they'll have lots of transport there about ration-time--eh?"

"Sound scheme," assents his coadjutor, a bloodthirsty stripling named
Ainslie. "Got the bearings?"

"Hand me that protractor. Seventy-one, nineteen, true. That
comes to"--Ayling performs a mental calculation--"almost exactly
eighty-five, magnetic. We'll go out about nine, with two guns, to the
corner of this dry ditch here--the range is two thousand five hundred,
exactly"--

"Our lightning calculator!" murmurs his admiring colleague. "No
elastic up the sleeve, or anything! All done by simple ledger-de-mang?
Proceed!"

--"And loose off a belt or two. What say?"

"Application forwarded, and strongly recommended," announced Ainslie.
He examined the map. "Cross-roads--eh? That means at least one
estaminet. One estaminet, with Bosches inside, complete! Think of our
little bullets all popping in through the open door, five hundred a
minute! Think of the rush to crawl under the counter! It might be a
Headquarters? We might get Von Kluck or Rupy of Bavaria, splitting
a half litre together. We shall earn Military Crosses over this, my
boy," concluded the imaginative youth. "Wow, wow!"

"The worst of indirect fire," mused the less gifted Ayling, "is that
you never can tell whether you have hit your target or not. In fact,
you can't even tell whether there was a target there to hit."

"Never mind; we'll chance it," replied Ainslie. "And if the Bosche
artillery suddenly wakes up and begins retaliating on the wrong spot
with whizz-bangs--well, we shall know we've tickled up _somebody_,
anyhow! Nine o'clock, you say?"

* * * * *

Here, again, is a bombing party, prepared to steal out under cover of
night. They are in charge of one Simson, recently promoted to Captain,
supported by that hoary fire-eater, Sergeant Carfrae. The party
numbers seven all told, the only other member thereof with whom we are
personally acquainted being Lance-Corporal M'Snape, the ex-Boy Scout.
Every man