We climbed a wooden ladder and squeezed into the tiny room upstairs from which the fire of this particular battery is directed. A long low loophole carefully protected with sandbags and steel plates provided me with my first view of the front.
I was now some fifteen feet or so above ground level and could see the backs of all our lines of trenches, could see the smoke of burning fires and men walking casually up and down or engaged in digging, planking, revetting, and so on. Beyond was the front line—less distinct and with fewer signs of activity in it; beyond that again a strip of varying width, untrampled, green and utterly forsaken—No Man's Land. A few charred tree-trunks from which every branch and twig had been stripped by shell fire, stuck up at intervals. I could see the first German parapet quite plainly and (with glasses) other lines behind it, and numerous wriggling communication trenches.
So this was "the Front," that vague term that comes so glibly to the lips of the people at home. I looked at it intently for a long time and I found that one idea crowded all others from my mind.
"What madness," I thought, "this is which possesses the world! What criminal waste, not only of lives and money, but of brains, ideas, ingenuity and time, all of which might have been devoted to construction instead of to destruction."
The Child noticed my absorption, read my thoughts perhaps, and translated them into his own phraseology thus:—"Dam' silly business, isn't it, when you come to think of it?"
The expression fitted. It is a damnably silly business, but, if we are to secure what the whole world longs for—a just and lasting peace—we have got to see this business through to the end, however silly, however wasteful it may seem. We have got to "stick it," as the soldier says, until the gathering forces are strong enough to break the barrier beyond all hope of repair; to break it and then to pour through to what will be the most overwhelming victory in the history of the world....
The major turned his head and spoke into a voice-tube beside him.
"Battery action," he said.
The operator on the ground floor repeated his words into a telephone. I pictured over again what I had seen in the morning; the detachments doubling to the places and the four guns instantly ready to answer the call.
It is altogether astonishing, this siege warfare. An officer sits in a ruined house, strongly fortified, and not so many hundred yards from the enemy. From there with ease and certainty he controls the fire of his four guns. He knows his "zone" and every object in it as completely as he knows his own features in a looking-glass. Further, he is connected by telephone with the infantry which he supports, and through the medium of his own headquarters with various other batteries. Normally this "observation" work is done by a subaltern, who, nowadays, thank Heaven and the munitions factories, shoots as much, if not more, than he is shot at. But occasionally the enemy is stirred up and "retaliates." This word, in its present military sense, was unknown before the war. It means just this—