It is a characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the comeliness of things.  These men had a lawn and a garden, tables and chairs.  If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New England sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies forth to remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then you know how scrupulous they were about litter.

For weeks they had been in the same position, unseen by German aeroplanes.  They had daily baths; they did their weekly laundry, taking care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky.  Every day they received the London papers and letters from home.  When they were needed to help in making war, all they had to do was to slip a shell in the breech and send it with their compliments to the Germans.  They were camping out at His Majesty’s expense in the pleasant land of France in the joyous summer time; and on the roof of sod over their guns were pots of flowers, undisturbed by blasts from the gun-muzzles.

It was when leaving another battery that out of the tail of my eye I caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp, ear-piercing crack that comes from being in line with a gun-muzzle when a shot is fired.  We followed a path which took us to the rear of the report, where we stepped through undergrowth among the busy group around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger calibres.

An order for some “heavy stuff” at a certain point on the map was being filled.  Sturdy men were moving in a pantomime under the shade of a willow tree, each doing exactly his part in a process that seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package of concentrated destruction, and closing the door.  All that detail of range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as an adding-machine adds up a column of figures.  Everybody was as practice-perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds of appearances in the same act on the stage.

All ready, the word given, a thunder peal and through the air you saw a wingless, black object in a faint curve against the soft blue sky, which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of water through a break in the garden hose multiplied by ten, rising to its zenith and then descending, till it passed out of sight behind a green bank of foliage on the horizon.

After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint, thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of steel which you had seen slipped into the breech.  This was the gunners’ part in chessboard war, where the moves are made over signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches and fight in their charges in the traverses of trenches at as close quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers.