r
where the officers had their mess. There were some home-made chairs up
there, and Kirchner prints of naked little ladies were tacked up to the
beams, among the trench maps, and round the fireplace where logs were
burning was a canvas screen to let down at night. A gramophone played
merry music and gave a homelike touch to this parlor in war.

"A good spot!" I said. "Is it well hidden?"

"As safe as houses," said the captain of the battery. "Touching wood, I
mean."

There were six of us sitting at a wooden plank on trestles, and at
those words five young men rose with a look of fright on their faces and
embraced the beam supporting the roof of the barn.

"What's happened?" I asked, not having heard the howl of a shell.

"Nothing," said the boy, "except touching wood. The captain spoke too
loudly."

We went out to the guns which were to do a little shooting, and
found them camouflaged from aerial eyes in the grim desolation of the
battlefield, all white after a morning's snowstorm, except where the
broken walls of distant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill
showed black as ink.

The gunners could not see their target, which had been given to them
through the telephone, but they knew it by the figures giving the angle
of fire.

"It's a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench," said a bright-eyed boy
by my side (he was one of the rising hopes of Fleet Street before he
became a gunner officer in Flanders). "With any luck we shall get 'em
in the neck, and I like to hear the Germans squeal... And my gun's ready
first, as usual."

The officer commanding shouted through a tin megaphone, and the battery
fired, each gun following its brother at a second interval, with the
staccato shock of a field-piece, which is more painful than the dull
roar of a "heavy."

A word came along the wire from the officer in the observation post a
mile away.

Another order was called through the tin mouthpiece.

"Repeat!"

"We've got'em," said the young gentleman by my side, in a cheerful way.

The officer with the megaphone looked across and smiled.

"We may as well give them a salvo. They won't like it a bit."

A second or two later there was a tremendous crash as the four guns
fired together. "Repeat!" came the high voice through the megaphone.

The still air was rent again... In a waterlogged trench, which we could
not see, a German pumping-party had been blown to bits.

The artillery officers took turns in the obs