The commanding officer was most kindly and patient in explaining matters to me.
"We can't see hide nor hair of our targets here, of course," he said, "any more than Fritz can see us. We get all our ranges and the records of all our hits, from Normabell."
I looked a question, I suppose.
"You called on him, I think—up on the Pimple. Major Normabell, D.S.O."
That was how I learned the name of the imperturbable major with whom I had smoked a pipe on the crest of Vimy Ridge. I shall always remember his name and him. I saw no man in France who made a livelier impression upon my mind and my imagination.
"Aye," I said. "I remember. So that's his name—Normabell, D.S.O.
I'll make a note of that."
My informant smiled.
"Normabell's one of our characters," he said. "Well, you see he commands a goodish bit of country there where he sits. And when he needs them he has aircraft observations to help him, too. He's our pair of eyes. We're like moles down here, we gunners—but he does all our seeing for us. And he's in constant communication—he or one of his officers."
I wondered where all the shells the battery was firing were headed for. And I learned that just then it was paying its respects particularly to a big factory building just west of Lens. For some reason that had been marked for destruction, but it had been reinforced and strengthened so that it was taking a lot of smashing and standing a good deal more punishment than anyone had thought it could—which was reason enough, in itself, to stick to the job until that factory was nothing more than a heap of dust and ruins.
The way the guns kept pounding away at it made me think of firemen in a small town drenching a local blaze with their hose. The gunners were just so eager as that. And I could almost see that factory, crumbling away. Major Normabell had pointed it out to me, up on the ridge, and now I knew why. I'll venture to say that before night the eight-inch howitzers of that battery had utterly demolished it, and so ended whatever usefulness it had had for the Germans.