If the newcomers put their shells into the target on their first trial they had qualified; and sometimes newcomers shoot quite as well as veterans, which is a surprise to both and the best kind of news for the general who is in charge of an expanding plant.  The war will be decided by gunners and infantry that knew nothing of guns or drill when the war began.

“Here are some who have been in France from the first,” said the general, when we came to a battery of field guns; of the eighteen-pounders, the fellows you see behind the galloping horses, the “hell-for-leather” guns, the guns which bring the gleam of affection into the eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the pitched-battle conditions before armies settled down in trenches and growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns of calibres which we associate with battleships and coast fortifications.

These are called “light stuff” and “whizz-bangs” now, in army parlance.  They throw only an eighteen-pound shell which carries three hundred bullets, but so fast that they chase one another through the air.  There has been so much talk about the need of heavy guns, you might think that eighteen-pounders were too small for consideration.  Were the German line broken, these are the ones which could gallop on the heels of the infantry.

They are the boys who weave the “curtain of fire” which you read about in the official bulletins as checking an infantry charge; which demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get into a trench.  If a general wants a shower of bullets over any part of the German line he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders and it is sent as promptly as the pressure of a button brings a pitcher of iced-water to a room in a first-class hotel.  A veteran eighteen-pounder crew in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement.  The gun itself seems to possess intelligence.

There was the finesse of gunners’ craft worthy of veterans in the way that these eighteen-pounders were concealed.  The Germans had put some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands.  They did not change the location of their battery and their judgment that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another object was justified.  Particularly I should like to mention the nature of their “funk-pits,” which kept them safe from the heaviest shells.  For the veterans knew how to take care of themselves; they had an eye to the protection which comes of experience with German high explosives.  Their expert knowledge of all the ins and outs of the business had been fought into them for over a year.

Another field battery, also, I have in mind, placed in an orchard.  Which orchard of all the thousands of orchards along the British front the German staff may guess, if they choose.  If German guns fired at all the orchards, one by one, they might locate it—­and then again they might not.  Besides, this is a peculiar sort of orchard.