most efficient for this and that purpose have the
floor when the result of a recent action does not furnish a fresher
topic. There are faddists and old fogies of course, as in every other
band of experts. The reports of the infantry out of its experience under
shell-bursts, which should be the gospel, may vary; for the infantry
think well of the guns when the charge goes home with casualties light
and ill when the going is bad.

Every day charts go up to the commanders showing the expenditure of
ammunition and the stock of different calibers on hand; for the army is
a most fastidious bookkeeper. Always there must be immense reserves for
an emergency, and on the Somme a day's allowance when the battle was
only "growling" was a month's a year previous. Let the general say the
word and fifty thousand more shells will be fired on Thursday than on
Wednesday. He throws off and on the switch of a Niagara of death. The
infantry is the Oliver Twist of incessant demand. It would like a score
of batteries turned on one machine gun, all the batteries in the army
against a battalion front, and a sheet of shells in the air night and
day, as you yourself would wish if you were up in the firing-line.

Guardians of the precious lives of their own men and destroyers of the
enemy's, the guns keep vigil. Every night the flashes on the horizon are
a reminder to those in the distance that the battle never ends. Their
voices are like none other except guns; the flash from their muzzles is
as suggestive as the spark from a dynamo, which says that death is there
for reaching out your hand. Something docile is in their might, like the
answering of the elephant's bulk to the mahout's command, in their
noiseless elevation and depression, and the bigger they are the smoother
appears their recoil as they settle back into place ready for another
shot. The valleys where the guns hide play tricks with acoustics. I
have sat on a hill with a dozen batteries firing under the brow and
their crashes were hardly audible.

"Only an artillery preparation, sir!" said an artilleryman as we started
up a slope stiff with guns, as the English say, all firing. You waited
your chance to run by after a battery had fired and were on the way
toward the next one before the one behind sent another round hurtling
overhead.

The deep-throated roar of the big calibers is not so hard on the ears as
the crack of the smaller calibers. Returning, you go in face of the
blasts