“Yes, quite a number,” said the officer.  “Our observer saw them lying about.”

The guns are watching for the targets at all hours—­the ever-hungry, ever-ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically-calculating, marvellously-accurate and also the guessing, wondering, blind, groping, helpless guns, which toss their steel messengers over streams, woodlands, and towns, searching for unseen prey in a wide landscape.

Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a trench wall or huddle in a dug-out as you hear an approaching scream and the earth trembles and the air is wracked by a concussion, and the cry of a man a few yards away tells of a hit.  Very accurate when still others, sent from muzzles six or seven thousand yards distant, fall in that same line of trench!  Very accurate when, before an infantry attack, with bursts of shrapnel bullets they cut to bits the barbed-wire entanglements in front of a trench!  The power of chaos that they seem to possess when the firing-trench and the dug-outs and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are beaten as flour is kneaded!

Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in a field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not be worth shooting at; when no one sees where the shells hit and the amount of damage they have done is all guesswork; and helpless without the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers to see for them.

One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a visible arm behind the blow.  An army guards against the blows of an enemy’s demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception, with all resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army guards its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a glance from the enemy’s eye, instead of having barrels of the strongest steel that can be forged.

Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in ratio to the amount of hell sent by the enemy’s which you have tasted.  After you have been scared stiff, while pretending that you were not, by sharing with Mr. Atkins an accurate bombardment of a trench and are convinced that the next shell is bound to get you, you fall into the attitude of the army.  You want to pat the demon on the back and say, “Nice old demon!” and watch him toss a shell three or four miles into the German lines from the end of his fiery tongue.  Indeed, nothing so quickly develops interest in the British guns as having the German gunners take too much personal interest in you.

You must have someone to show you the way or you would not find any guns.  A man with a dog trained to hunt guns might spend a week on the gun-position area covering ten miles of the front and not locate half the guns.  He might miss “Grandmother” and “Sister” and “Betsy” and “Mike” and even “Mister Archibald,” who is the only one who does not altogether try to avoid publicity.