The customary methods employed by the Germans to get information as to our guns, our troops, our supplies around Ypres, was to send a disguised soldier to the different farmhouses and threaten them with instant demolition by their guns if they did not furnish the information sought for, and thus did Fritz make good his promise to the farmer.  By reason of our dummy guns and the strafing they got, and the fact that our guns still were firing, he believed that the farmer had given him a bunco steer, and he lost no time in making good his word.

Remaining in the hedge for a few hours, we dug holes for the guns, covered them with tarpaulins and grass on top, giving them the usual scenic shelter.  We did this work in the open but only one man at a time exposed; it was as much as life was worth for more than one to be seen working.  That evening, in the midst of our meal at cookhouse,—­“Stand to!” and we raced for our pets.  When the concert was well under way, Munsey noticed a light three or four hundred yards off that was acting somewhat peculiarly; it would flare up and down oddly and seemed to be in a farmhouse straight at our rear, but not much attention was paid to it at the time.  Next morning Munsey and I were in the cookhouse, trying to moisten a couple of hardtack biscuits with what juice we could extract from a piece of bacon rind, when an airplane hummed overhead and the attention of one of our anti-aircraft guns was immediately diverted to the bird.  The cookhouse had formerly been a French dressing station, dismantled by the fire of those devils that know no law of God or man, composed of three huts in a row made of half-inch board.  While eating, one of our own shells, a shrapnel, that had been sent up at a German stork and did not explode, dropped squarely into the middle of the cookhouse, frightened the cook out of his wits and hit the dixies, scattering them around our feet.  “Stand to!” and we made our way carefully, keeping out of sight as much as possible from the watching bird overhead.

When I got to the gun the shell fire was commencing to get dangerously close.  “By God, there must be somebody giving our battery away,” said Munsey.  A number of our men had been wounded at this time and the airplane still buzzing above, made it impossible for us to fire, and we got a “Stand down!”

“Come on over,” Munsey proposed, “and we’ll see what’s in that building where I saw the light.”  We found a family of civilians living there and they were at once very solicitous about giving us coffee.  “Never mind the coffee,” said Munsey; “we have come to examine the house.”  The old man seemed quite willing to have us do so and pointed the way upstairs, starting himself to go out the door.  Munsey grabbed him by the arm,—­“Come along and show us the way.”  He indicated that we could find the way ourselves, but my mate was insistent and he forced the old man along and upstairs we went.