Servants of the Guns

JEFFERY E. JEFFERY
By the ears and the eyes and the brain, By the limbs and the hands and the wings, We are slaves to our masters the guns, But their slaves are the masters of kings! Gilbert Frankau.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED LONDON AND BECCLES, ENGLAND
TO ONE WHO KNOWS NOTHING OF GUNS BUT MUCH OF LIFE
MY MOTHER
CONTENTS
THE NEW UBIQUE
As the long troop train rumbled slowly over the water-logged wastes of Flanders, I sat in the corner of a carriage which was littered with all the débris of a twenty-four hours' journey and watched the fiery winter's sun set gorgeously. It was Christmas evening. Inevitably my mind went back to that other journey of sixteen months ago when we set forth so proudly, so exultantly to face the test of war.
But how different, how utterly different is everything now! Last time, with the sun shining brilliantly from a cloudless sky and the French sentries along the line waving enthusiastically, we passed cheerfully through the pleasant land of France towards our destination on the frontier. I was a subaltern then, a subordinate member of a battery which, according to pre-war standards, was equipped and trained to perfection—and I can say this without presumption, for having only joined it in July I had had no share in the making of it. But I had been in it long enough to appreciate its intense esprit-de-corps , long enough to share the absolute confidence in its efficiency which inspired every man in it from the major to the second trumpeter.
But now it is midwinter, the second winter of the war, and the French sentries no longer wave to us, for they have seen too many train-loads of English troops to be more than mildly interested. The war to which we set out so light-heartedly sixteen months ago has proved itself to be not the greatest of games, but the greatest of all ghastly horrors threatening the final disruption of civilised humanity. More than a year has passed and the end is not in sight. But the cause is as righteous, the victory as certain now as it was then.... The methods and practice of warfare have been revolutionised. Theory after theory has been disproved by the devastating power of the high explosive and the giant gun. Horse and field batteries no longer dash into action to the music of jingling harness and thudding hoofs. They creep in by night with infinite precautions and place their guns in casemates which are often ten feet thick; they occupy the same position not for hours, but for months at a time; they fire at targets which are sometimes only fifty yards or even less in front of their own infantry, with the knowledge that the smallest error may mean death to their comrades; and the control of their shooting is no longer an affair of good eyesight and common sense, but of science, complicated instruments, and a multiplicity of telephones.