"Here, they are firing more than six!" said the general. "It's always hard to hold these gunners down when they are on the target like that."
He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the temptation himself. The wireless station got two extra shells for full measure. Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had been enough. Conservation of shells has become a first principle of the artillerists' duty. The number fired by either side in the course of the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising. Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a shell into a gun- breech. The men in the trenches are always calling for shells. They want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked down. The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.
"The Boches will be coming back at us soon, you will see!" said one of the officers who was at our observation post. "They always do. The other day they chose this particular spot for their target"—which was a good reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.
Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is a you-hit-me-and-I'll-hit-you character about siege warfare. Gun-fire provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It was not long before we heard the whish of German shells passing some distance away.
They say sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling and horrible fascination. Knowing what the target is, knowing the object of the fire, hearing the scream of the projectile on the way and watching to see if it is to be a hit, when the British are fighting the Germans on the soil of France, has an intensive thrill which is missing to the spectator who looks on at the Home Sports Club shooting at clay pigeons—which is not in justification of war. It does explain, however, the attraction of gunnery to gunners. One forgets, for the instant, that men are being killed and mangled. He thinks only of points scored in a contest which requires all the wit and strength and fortitude of man and all his cunning in the manufacture and control of material.
You want your side to win; in this case, because it is the side of humanity and of that kindly general and the things that he and the army he represents stand for. The blows which the demons from the British lairs strike are to you the blows of justice; and you are glad when they go home. They are your blows. You have a better reason for keeping an army's artillery secrets than for keeping secret the signals of your Varsity football team, which anyone instinctively keeps—the reason of a world cause.
Yet another thing to see—an aeroplane assisting a battery by spotting the fall of its shells, which is engrossing enough, too, and amazingly simple. Of course this battery was proud of its method of concealment. Each battery commander will tell you that a British plane has flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his battery. If it is located, there is more work due in "make-up" to complete the disguise. Competition among batteries is as keen as among battleships of our North Atlantic fleet.
Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely at home as a first-class Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other battery had a dug-out for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for their bed, right between two gun-emplacements.
"We found the mother wild, out there in the woods," one of the men explained. "She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home destroyed by shell-fire. At first she wouldn't let us approach her, and we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups will bring us luck. We'll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots, eh?"
On our way back to the general's headquarters we must have passed other batteries hidden from sight only a stone's throw away; and yet in an illustrated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy, but engaged in destroying all the enemy's batteries, according to the account. Twelve months of war have not shaken conventional ideas about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.