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.

It was cruel business to be knocking the towns and factories of our ally, France, to bits in the fashion that we were doing that day—­ there and at many another point along the front.  The Huns are fond of saying that much of the destruction in Northern France has been the work of allied artillery.  True enough—­but who made that inevitable And it was not our guns that laid waste a whole countryside before the German retreat in the spring of 1917, when the Huns ran wild, rooting up fruit trees, cutting down every other tree that could be found, and doing every other sort of wanton damage and mischief their hands could find to do.

“Hard lines,” said the battery commander.  He shrugged his shoulders.  “No use trying to spare shells here, though, even on French towns.  The harder we smash them the sooner it’ll be over.  Look here, sir.”

He pointed out the men who sat, their telephone receivers strapped over their ears.  Each served a gun.  In all that hideous din it was of the utmost importance that they should hear correctly every word and figure that came to them over the wire—­a part of that marvelously complete telephone and telegraph system that has been built for and by the British army in France.

“They get corrections on every shot,” he told me.  “The guns are altered in elevation according to what they hear.  The range is changed, and the pointing, too.  We never see old Fritz—­but we know he’s getting the visiting cards we send him.”

They were amazingly calm, those laddies at the telephones.  In all that hideous, never-ending din, they never grew excited.  Their voices were calm and steady as they repeated the orders that came to them.  I have seen girls at hotel switchboards, expert operators, working with conditions made to their order, who grew infinitely more excited at a busy time, when many calls were coming in and going out.  Those men might have been at home, talking to a friend of their plans for an evening’s diversion, for all the nervousness or fussiness they showed.