This order was repeated to the guns by megaphone.
Bang went No. 1 and its shell whistled and swished away towards its goal.
Bang followed No. 2 just before "No. 1 ready" was called back.
It all seemed astonishingly simple, and it seemed, too, quite unconnected with war and bloodshed. Orders to fire came by telephone from some place thousands of yards in front. The guns were duly fired by men who had no conception of what they were firing at, men who had in all probability never been nearer to the enemy than they were at that moment, and who had in fact not the slightest conception of what the front line looked like. According to order these same men made minute adjustments of angles, ranges, fuzes, until the battery's shells were falling on or very close to some spot selected by the Forward Observing Officer, the one man who really knew what was happening. And when this exacting individual was satisfied, each sergeant duly recorded his "register" of the target upon a printed form, reminding me vaguely of the manner in which a 'bus conductor notes down mysterious figures on a block after referring to his packet of tickets. After which the detachments, receiving the order "Break off," returned to their work or dinners with no thought whatever (I am sure of this) as to where their shell had gone or why or how! But then this was not a "show" but just an ordinary morning's shoot.
We lunched in the mess, a comfortable room with a red-tiled floor and a large open fireplace on which logs of wood crackled merrily. On inquiry I learnt that these same logs were once beams in the church at ——, devastated not long since by heavy shells and now a heap of shapeless ruins from which the marauding soldier filches bricks and iron work. And that church was centuries old and was once beautiful. War is indeed glorious.
I have heard it said that people who live close to Niagara are quite unconscious of the sound of the Falls. I can believe it. Practically speaking, in this part of the world, two minutes never pass, day or night, during which no one fires a gun. But the human beings whose job it is to live and work here evince absolutely no interest if the swish of the shell is away from them and very little if it is coming towards them, unless there appears to be a reasonable chance that it is coming at them. Throughout lunch the next battery to this one was firing steadily. Rather diffidently I asked what was going on. The major commanding the battery shrugged his shoulders.
"Old —— has probably got some job on—or he may be merely retaliating," he replied.
I subsided, not knowing then that before the day was over I was to learn more about this same retaliation.
After lunch we set out for the O.P.[5]
[5] Observation Post.