aeroplanes.  I am speaking now of the particular type of aeroplane employed for regulating artillery fire.  It was a young non-commissioned officer with a marked Southern accent who explained to us the secret nature of things.  He was wearing both the Military Medal and the Legion of Honour, for he had done wondrous feats in the way of shooting the occupants of Taubes in mid-air.  He got out one of the machines, and exhibited its tricks and its wireless apparatus, and invited us to sit in the seat of the flier.  The weather was quite unsuitable for flying, but, setting four men to hold the machine in place, he started the Gnome motor and ran it up to two thousand revolutions a minute, creating a draught which bowed the fluttered wheat for many yards behind and blew hats off.  And in the middle of this pother he continued to offer lucid and surprising explanations to deafened ears until his superior officer, excessively smart and looking like a cross between a cavalryman and a yachtsman, arrived on the scene swinging a cane.

It was natural that after this we should visit some auto-cannons expressly constructed for bringing down aeroplanes.  In front of these marvels it was suggested to us that we should neither take photographs nor write down exact descriptions.  As regards the latter, the Staff officers had reason to be reassured.  No living journalist could have reproduced the scientific account of the sighting arrangements given to us in an esoteric yet quite comprehensible language by the high priest of these guns, who was a middle-aged artillery Captain.  It lasted about twenty minutes.  It was complete, final, unchallengeable.  At intervals the artillery Captain himself admitted that such-and-such a part of the device was tres beau.  It was.  There was only one word of which I could not grasp the significance in that connection.  It recurred.  Several times I determined to ask the Captain what he meant us to understand by that word; but I lacked moral courage.  I doubt whether in all the lethal apparatus that I saw in France I saw anything quite equal to the demoniac ingenuity of these massive guns.  The proof of guns is in the shooting.  These guns do not merely aim at Taubes:  they hit them.

I will not, however, derogate from the importance of the illustrious “seventy-five.”  We saw one of these on an afternoon of much marching up and down hills and among woods, gazing at horses and hot-water douches, baths, and barbers’ shops, and deep dug-outs called “Tipperary,” and guns of various calibre, including the “seventy-five.”  The “seventy-five” is a very sympathetic creature, in blue-grey with metallic glints.  He is perfectly easy to see when you approach him from behind, but get twenty yards in front of him and he is absolutely undiscoverable.  Viewed from the sky, he is part of the forest.  Viewed from behind, he is perceived to be in a wooden hut with rafters, in which you can just stand upright.  We beheld the working of the gun, by two men, and we beheld the different sorts of shell in their delved compartments.  But this was not enough for us.  We ventured to suggest that it would be proper to try to kill a few Germans for our amusement.  The request was instantly granted.