d dugouts with his ear hitched to a telephone. Without
lifting his head or turning it he sang out. At that all the other men
sprang up very promptly. Before, they had been sprawled about in sunny
places, smoking and sleeping, and writing on postcards. Postcards,
butter and beer--these are the German private's luxuries, but most of
all postcards. The men bestirred themselves.

"You are in luck, gentlemen," said the lieutenant. "This battery has
been idle all day, but now it is to begin firing. The order to fire
just came. The balloon operator, who is in communication with the
observation pits beyond the foremost infantry trenches, will give the
range and the distance. Listen, please." He held up his hand for
silence, intent on hearing what the man at the telephone was repeating
back over the line. "Ah, that's it--5400 meters straight over the tree
tops."

He waved us together into a more compact group. "That's the idea.
Stand here, please, behind Number One gun, and watch straight ahead of
you for the shot--you must watch very closely or you will miss it--and
remember to keep your mouth open to save your eardrums from being
injured by the concussion."

So far as I personally was concerned this last bit of advice was
unnecessary--my mouth was open already. Four men trotted to a magazine
that was in an earthen kennel and came back bearing a wheelless sheet-
metal barrow on which rested a three-foot-long brass shell, very trim
and slim and handsome and shiny like gold. It was an expensive-looking
shell and quite ornate. At the tail of Number One the bearers heaved
the barrow up shoulder-high, at the same time tilting it forward. Then
a round vent opened magically and the cyclops sucked the morsel forward
into its gullet, thus reversing the natural swallowing process, and
smacked its steel lip behind it with a loud and greasy snuck! A glutton
of a gun--you could tell that from the sound it made.

A lieutenant snapped out something, a sergeant snapped it back to him,
the gun crew jumped aside, balancing themselves on tiptoe with their
mouths all agape, and the gun-firer either pulled a lever out or else
pushed one home, I couldn't tell which. Then everything--sky and woods
and field and all--fused and ran together in a great spatter of red
flame and white smoke, and the earth beneath our feet shivered and shook
as the twenty-one-centimeter spat out its twenty-one-centimeter
mouthful. A vast obscenity of so