t of the
professional for the layman who intrudes on his mysteries.
Other civilians had come that way before--had seen, and
grinned, and complimented and gone their way, leaving the
gunners high up on the bleak hillside to grill or mildew or
freeze for weeks and months. Then she spoke. Her voice was
higher pitched, it seemed, than ours--with a more shrewish
tang to the speeding shell. Her recoil was as swift and as
graceful as the shrug of a French-woman's shoulders; the empty
case leaped forth and clanged against the trail; the tops of
two or three pines fifty yards away nodded knowingly to each
other, though there was no wind.

"They'll be bothered down below to know the meaning of our
single shot. We don't give them one dose at a time as a
rule," somebody laughed.

We waited in the fragrant silence. Nothing came back from the
mist that clogged the lower grounds, though no shell of this
war was ever launched with more earnest prayers that it might
do hurt.

Then they talked about the lives of guns; what number of
rounds some will stand and others will not; how soon one can
make two good guns out of three spoilt ones, and what crazy
luck sometimes goes with a single shot or a blind salvo.

LESSON FROM THE "BOCHE"

A shell must fall somewhere, and by the law of averages
occasionally lights straight as a homing pigeon on the one
spot where it can wreck most. Then earth opens for yards
around, and men must be dug out,--some merely breathless, who
shake their ears, swear, and carry on, and others whose souls
have gone loose among terrors. These have to be dealt with as
their psychology demands, and the French officer is a good
psychologist. One of them said: "Our national psychology has
changed. I do not recognize it myself."

"What made the change?"

"The Boche. If he had been quiet for another twenty years the
world must have been his--rotten, but all his. Now he is
saving the world."

"How?"

"Because he has shown us what Evil is. We--you and I, England
and the rest--had begun to doubt the existence of Evil. The
Boche is saving us."

Then we had another look at the animal in its trench--a little
nearer this time than before, and quieter on account of the
mist. Pick up the chain anywhere you please, you shall find
the same observation-post, table, map, observer, and
telephonist; the same always-hidden, always-ready guns; and
same vexed foreshore of trenches, smoking and shaking from
Swi