I put my eyes to the openings, and tried to imagine an aeroplane overhead, manoeuvring to drop a bomb or a dart on me while I calculated its altitude.  I could not do it.

Next I was shown the guns.  They were the famous seventy-five-millimetre guns of France, transformed into aircraft guns by the simple expedient of installing them in a pit with sloping sides, so that their noses pointed up and out.  To swing them round, so that they pointed readily toward any portion of the sky, a circular framework of planks formed a round rim to the pit, and on this runway, heavily greased, the muzzles were swung about.

The gun drill began.  It was executed promptly, skilfully.  There was no bungling, not a wrong motion or an unnecessary one, as they went through the movements of loading, sighting and firing the guns.  It was easy to see why French artillery has won its renown.  The training of the French artilleryman is twice as severe as that of the infantryman.  Each man, in addition to knowing his own work on the gun, must be able to do the work of all the eleven others.  Casualties must occur, and in spite of them the work of the gun must go on.

Casualties had occurred at that station.  More than half the original battery was gone.  The little shelter house was splintered in a hundred places.  There were shell holes throughout the field, and the breech of one gun had recently been shattered and was undergoing repair.

The drill was over and the gunners stood at attention.  I asked permission to photograph the battery, and it was cheerfully given.  One after the other I took the guns, until I had taken four.  The gunners waited smilingly expectant.  For the last gun I found I had no film, but I could not let it go at that.  So I pointed the empty camera at it and snapped the shutter.  It would never do to show discrimination.

Somewhere in London are all those pictures.  They have never been sent to me.  No doubt a watchful English government pounced on them in the mail, and, in connection with my name, based on them most unjust suspicions.  They were very interesting.  There was Captain Mignot, and the two imposing officers from General Foch’s staff; there were smiling young French gunners; there was the telemeter, which cost, they told me, ten thousand francs, and surely deserved to have its picture taken, and there was one, not too steady, of a patch of sunny sky and a balloon-shaped white cloud, where another German shrapnel had burst overhead.

The drill was over.  We went back along the path toward the road.  Behind the storehouse the evening meal was preparing in a shed.  The battery was to have a new ration that night for a change, bacon and codfish.  Potatoes were being pared into a great kettle and there was a bowl of eggs on a stand.  It appeared to me, accustomed to the meagre ration of the Belgians, that the French were dining well that night on the plains of Ypres.