That battery hidden from aerial observation in the thick forest kept up its slow firing at intervals.  It was “bothering” one of the German trenches.  Fiendish the consistent regularity with which it kept on, and so easy for the gunners.  They had only to slip in a shell, swing a breech-lock home, and pull a lanyard.  The German guns did not respond because they could not locate the French battery.  They may have known that it was somewhere in the forest, but firing at two or three hundred acres of wood on the chance of reaching some guns heavily protected by earth and timbering was about like tossing a pea from the top of the Washington Monument on the chance of hitting a four-leafed clover on the lawn below.

Our little group remained, not standing in the trench but back of it, in full relief for some time; for the German gunners refused to play for realism by sending us a marmite.  Probably they had seen us through the telescope at the start and concluded we weren’t worth a shot.  In the first months of the war such a target would have received a burst of shells, for the fun of seeing us scatter, if nothing else.  Then ammunition was plentiful and the sport of shooting had not lost its zest; but in these winter days orders were not to waste ammunition.

The factories must manufacture a supply ahead for the summer campaign.  There must be fifteen dollars’ worth of target in sight, say, for the smallest shell costs that; and the shorter you are of shells the more valuable the target must be.  Besides, firing a cannon had become as commonplace a function to both French and German gunners as getting up to put another stick of wood in the stove or going to open the door to take a letter from the postman.

We had glimpses of other trenches; but this is not the place in this book to write of trenches.  We shall see trenches till we are weary of them later.  We are going direct to Gerbeviller which was—­emphasis on the past tense—­a typical little Lorraine town of fifteen hundred inhabitants.  Look where you would now, as we drove along the road, and you saw churches without steeples, houses with roofs standing on sections of walls, houses smashed into bits.

“I saw no such widespread destruction as this in Belgium!” I exclaimed.

“There was no such fighting in Belgium,” was the answer.

Of course not, except in the south-western corner, where the armies still face each other.

“Not all the damage was done by the Germans,” the major explained.  “Naturally, when they were pouring in death from the cover of a house, our guns let drive at that house,” he went on.  “The owners of the houses that were hit by our shells are rather proud—­proud of our marksmanship, proud that we gave the unwelcome guest a hot pill to swallow.”