d projectile.

It is only eighteen years since I saw, at the battle of Domoko in the
Greco-Turkish war, half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on the
plain of Thessaly, limber up in the open, and discharge salvos with
black powder, in the good, old battle-panorama style. One battery of
modern field guns unseen would wipe out the lot in five minutes. Only
ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud of
shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of
Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by
impact on the ground, a Japanese military attache remarked:

"There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!"

He was right. He knew his business as a military attache. But the
Allies might also make guns and go on making them till they have
enough. The voices of the guns along the front seem never silent. In
some direction they are always firing. When one night the reports
from a certain quarter seemed rather heavy, I asked the reason the
next day.

"No, not very heavy. No attack," a division staff officer explained.
"The Boches had been building a redoubt, and we turned on some
h.e.s."--meaning high explosive shells.

Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been
labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved. They
had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth
softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the
redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the
view of the British trenches. Such is the hide-and-seek character of
modern war.

What the German builders did not know was that a British aeroplane
had been watching them day by day, and that the spot was nicely
registered on a British gunner's map. On this map it was a certain
numbered point. Press a button, as it were, and you ring the bell with
a shell at that point. And the gunners waited till the house of cards
was up before knocking it to pieces.

Surprise is the thing with the guns. A town may go for weeks without
getting a single shell. Then it may get a score of shells in ten minutes;
or it may be shelled regularly every day for ensuing weeks. "They are
shelling X again," or, "They have been leaving Z alone for a long
time," is a part of the gossip up and down the line. Towns are proud
of having escaped altogether, and proud of the number and size of
the shells received.

"Did you get any?" I as