ashed dugouts and machine gun positions
you may be received by showers of bombs. No wonder that gunners work
hard! No wonder that discipline is tightened by the screw of fearful
responsibility!

At the front we had a sort of reverence for Grandmother, the first of
the fifteen-inch howitzers to arrive as the belated answer of "prepared
England" who "forced the war" on "unprepared Germany" to the famous
forty-two centimeters that pounded Liege and Maubeuge. Gently
Grandmother with her ugly mouth and short neck and mammoth supporting
ribs of steel was moved and nursed; for she, too, was temperamental.
Afterward, Grandfather came and Uncle and Cousin and Aunt and many grown
sons and daughters, until the British could have turned the city of
Lille into ruins had they chosen; but they kept their destruction for
the villages on the Somme, which represent a property loss remarkably
small, as the average village could be rebuilt for not over two hundred
thousand dollars.

Other children of smaller caliber also arrived in surprising numbers.
Make no mistake about that nine-inch howitzer, which appears to be only
a monstrous tube of steel firing a monstrous shell, not being a
delicately adjusted piece of mechanism. The gunner, his clothes
oil-soaked, who has her breech apart pays no attention to the field of
guns around him or the burst of a shell a hundred yards away, no more
than the man with a motor breakdown pays to passing traffic. Is he a
soldier? Yes, by his uniform, but primarily a mechanic, this man from
Birmingham, who is polishing that heavy piece of steel which, when it
locks in the breech, holds the shell fast in place and allows all the
force of the explosion to pass through the muzzle, while the recoil
cylinder takes up the shock as nicely as on a battleship, with no
tremble of the base set in the debris of a village. He shakes his head,
this preoccupied mechanician. It may be necessary to call in the gun
doctor. His "how" has been in service a long time, but is not yet
showing the signs of general debility of the eight-inch battery near by.
They have fired three times their allowance and are still good for
sundry purposes in the gunner-general's play of red and black pins on
his map. The life of guns has surpassed all expectations; but the
smaller calibers forward and the _soixante-quinze_ must not suffer from
general debility when they lay on a curtain of fire to cover a charge.

War is still a matter of projec