Immediately then and twice again that day we were technically presumed to be under fire—­I use the word technically advisedly—­and again the next day and once again two days thereafter before Antwerp, but I was never able to convince myself that it was so.  Certainly there was no sense of actual danger as we sped through the empty single street of a despoiled and tenantless village.  All about us were the marks of what the shellfire had done, some fresh and still smoking, some old and dry-charred, but no shells dropped near us as we circled in a long swing up to within half a mile of the first line of German trenches and perhaps a mile to the left of them.

Thereby we arrived safely and very speedily and without mishap at a battery of twenty-one-centimeter guns, standing in a gnawed sheep pasture behind an abandoned farmhouse, what was left of a farmhouse, which was to say very little of it indeed.  The guns stood in a row, and each one of them—­there were five in all—­stared with its single round eye at the blue sky where the sky showed above a thick screen of tall slim poplars growing on the far side of the farmyard.  We barely had time to note that the men who served the guns were denned in holes in the earth like wolves, with earthen roofs above them and straw beds to lie on, and that they had screened each gun in green saplings cut from the woods and stuck upright in the ground, to hide its position from the sight of prying aeroplane scouts, and that the wheels of the guns were tired with huge, broad steel plates called caterpillars, to keep them from bogging down in miry places—­I say we barely had time to note these details mentally when things began to happen.  There was a large and much be-mired soldier who spraddled face downward upon his belly in one of the straw-lined dugouts with his ear hitched to a telephone.  Without lifting his head or turning it he sang out.  At that all the other men sprang up very promptly.  Before, they had been sprawled about in sunny places, smoking and sleeping, and writing on postcards.  Postcards, butter and beer—­these are the German private’s luxuries, but most of all postcards.  The men bestirred themselves.

“You are in luck, gentlemen,” said the lieutenant.  “This battery has been idle all day, but now it is to begin firing.  The order to fire just came.  The balloon operator, who is in communication with the observation pits beyond the foremost infantry trenches, will give the range and the distance.  Listen, please.”  He held up his hand for silence, intent on hearing what the man at the telephone was repeating back over the line.  “Ah, that’s it—­5400 meters straight over the tree tops.”

He waved us together into a more compact group.  “That’s the idea.  Stand here, please, behind Number One gun, and watch straight ahead of you for the shot—­you must watch very closely or you will miss it—­and remember to keep your mouth open to save your eardrums from being injured by the concussion.”