We left the car at a cottage and walked along a lane.  I looked all about the premises and could see only some artillerymen.  An officer led me up to a gun-breech; at least, I know a gun-breech when it is one foot from my nose and a soldier has removed its covering.  But I shall not tell how that gun was concealed; the method was so audacious that it was entirely successful.  The Germans would like to know and we don’t want them to know.  A little pencil-point on their map for identification, and they would send a whirlwind of shells at that gun.

And then?

Would the gun try to fire back?  No.  Its gunners probably would not know the location of any of the guns of the German battery which had concentrated on their treasure.  They would desert the gun.  If they did not, they ought to be court-martialled for needlessly risking the precious lives of trained men.  They would make for the “funk-pits,” as they call the dug-outs, just as the gunners of any other Power would.

The chances are that the gun itself would not be hit bodily by a shell.  Fragments might strike it without causing more than an abrasion; for big guns have pretty thick cuticles.  When the storm was over, the gunners would move their treasure to another hiding-place; which would mean a good deal of work, on account of its size.

It is the inability of gun to see gun, and even when seen to knock out gun, which has put an end to the so-called artillery duel of pitched-battle days, when cannon walloped cannon to keep cannon from walloping the infantry.  Now when there is an action, though guns still go after guns if they know where they are, most of the firing is done against trenches and to support trenches and infantry works, or with a view to demoralizing the infantry.  Concentration of artillery fire will demolish an enemy’s trench and let your infantry take possession of the wreckage remaining; but then the enemy’s artillery concentrates on your infantry and frequently makes their new habitation untenable.

Noiselessly except for a little click, with chickens clucking in a field near by, the big breech-block which held the shell fast, sending all the power of the explosion out of the muzzle, was swung back and one looked through the shining tube of steel, with its rifling which caught the driving band and gave the shell its rotation and accuracy in its long journey, which would close when, descending at the end of its parabola, its nose struck building, earth, or pavement and it exploded.

Wheels that lift and depress and swing the muzzle, and gadgets with figures, and other scales which play between the map and the gadgets, and atmospheric pressure and wind-variation, all worked out with the same precision under a French hedge as on board a battleship where the gun-mounting is fast to massive ribs of steel—­it seemed a matter of book-keeping and trigonometry rather than war.