The heavy German battery lay snugly hidden in a wood on the rolling heights of the Cote Lorraine.  Better off than the French, whose aviators had for days repeatedly scrutinized every acre of land in the vicinity looking for these guns, we had fairly accurate directions how to find the battery, but even then it required some search and doubling back and forth before a languid artilleryman lounging by the roadside pointed with thumb over shoulder toward the hidden guns.

These and the artillerymen were enjoying their midday rest, a pause which sets in every day with the regularity of the luncheon hour in a factory.  The guns, two in this particular position, stood beneath a screen of thickly branching trees, the muzzles pointing toward round openings in this leafy roof.  The gun carriages were screened with branches.  The shelter tents of the men and the house for the ammunition had also been covered with green, and around the position a hedge of boughs kept off the prying eyes of possible French spies wandering through the woods.

It was the noon pause, but the Lieutenant in charge of the guns, anxious to show them off to advantage, volunteered to telephone the battery commander, in his observation post four miles nearer the enemy, for permission to fire a shot or two against a village in which French troops were gathering for the attack.  This battery had just finished with Les Paroches, a French barrier fort across the Meuse, and was now devoting its attention to such minor tasks.  Only forts really counted, said the Lieutenant, recalling Fort Manonvillers, near Luneville, the strongest French barrier fort, which was the battery’s first “bag” of the war.  Its capture, thanks to his guns, had cost the German Army only three lives, those of three pioneers accidentally killed by the fire of their own men.  Now Les Paroches was a heap of crumbled earth and stone.  In default of forts the guns were used against any “worthy target”—­a “worthy target” being defined as a minimum of fifty infantrymen.

At this moment the orderly reported that the battery commander authorized two shots against the village in question.  At command the gun crew sprang to their posts about the mortar, which was already adjusted for its target, a little less than six miles away, the gun muzzle pointing skyward at an angle of about 60 degrees.  As the gun was fired the projectile could be seen and followed in its course for several hundred feet.  The report was not excessively loud.

Before the report died away the crew were busy as bees about the gun.  One man, with the hand elevating gear, rapidly cranked the barrel down to a level position, ready for loading.  A second threw open the breech and extracted the brass cartridge case, carefully wiping [Transcriber:  original ‘wipping’] it out before depositing it among the empties; four more seized the heavy shell and lifted it to a cradle opposite the breech; a seventh rammed it home; number eight gingerly inserted the brass cartridge, half filled with a vaseline-like explosive; the breech was closed, and the gun pointer rapidly cranked the gun again into position.  In less than thirty seconds the men sprang back from the gun, again loaded and aimed.  A short wait, and the observer from his post near the village ordered “next shot fifty meters nearer.”