“Gawd!  Wat a ’ole!” remarks Mr. Thomas Atkins casually, at sight of an excavation in the earth made by a thousand-pound projectile.

It is only eighteen years since I saw, at the battle of Domoko in the Greco-Turkish war, half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on the plain of Thessaly, limber up in the open, and discharge salvos with black powder, in the good, old battle-panorama style.  One battery of modern field guns unseen would wipe out the lot in five minutes.  Only ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud of shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by impact on the ground, a Japanese military attache remarked: 

“There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!”

He was right.  He knew his business as a military attache.  But the Allies might also make guns and go on making them till they have enough.  The voices of the guns along the front seem never silent.  In some direction they are always firing.  When one night the reports from a certain quarter seemed rather heavy, I asked the reason the next day.

“No, not very heavy.  No attack,” a division staff officer explained.  “The Boches had been building a redoubt, and we turned on some h.e.s.”—­meaning high explosive shells.

Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved.  They had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the view of the British trenches.  Such is the hide-and-seek character of modern war.

What the German builders did not know was that a British aeroplane had been watching them day by day, and that the spot was nicely registered on a British gunner’s map.  On this map it was a certain numbered point.  Press a button, as it were, and you ring the bell with a shell at that point.  And the gunners waited till the house of cards was up before knocking it to pieces.

Surprise is the thing with the guns.  A town may go for weeks without getting a single shell.  Then it may get a score of shells in ten minutes; or it may be shelled regularly every day for ensuing weeks.  “They are shelling X again,” or, “They have been leaving Z alone for a long time,” is a part of the gossip up and down the line.  Towns are proud of having escaped altogether, and proud of the number and size of the shells received.

“Did you get any?” I asked the division staff officer who had told me about the session the six-inch howitzers had enjoyed.  A common question that, at the front, “Did you get any?” (meaning Germans).  A practical question, too.  It has nothing to do with the form of play or any bit of sensational fielding; only with the score, with results, with casualties.