For the benefit of the uninitiated, let me explain that the process of registering consists of finding the exact range to a certain object from a particular gun or battery. To find this range it is necessary to obtain what is known as a bracket: i.e. one burst beyond the object, and one burst short. The range is then known to lie between these two: and by a little adjustment the exact distance can be found.
CHAPTER VI
BLACK, WHITE, AND—GREY
Four weeks after his board Jim Denver once again found himself in France.
Having reported his arrival, he sat down to await orders. Boulogne is not a wildly exhilarating place; though there is always the hotel where one may consume cocktails and potato chips, and hear strange truths about the war from people of great knowledge and understanding.
Moreover—though this is by the way—in Boulogne you get the first sniff of that atmosphere which England lacks; that subtle, indefinable something which war in a country produces in the spirit of its people....
Gone is the stout lady of doubtful charm engaged in mastering the fox-trot, what time a band wails dismally in an alcove; gone is the wild-eyed flapper who bumps madly up and down the roads on the carrier of a motor-cycle. It has an atmosphere of its own this fair land of France to-day. It is laughing through its tears, and the laughter has an ugly sound—for the Huns. They will hear that laughter soon, and the sound will give them to think fearfully.
But at the moment when Jim landed it was all very boring. The R.T.O. at Boulogne was bored; the A.S.C. officers at railhead were bored; the quartermaster guarding the regimental penates in a field west of Ypres was bored.