ked the division staff officer who had told me
about the session the six-inch howitzers had enjoyed. A common
question that, at the front, "Did you get any?" (meaning Germans). A
practical question, too. It has nothing to do with the form of play or
any bit of sensational fielding; only with the score, with results, with
casualties.

"Yes, quite a number," said the officer. "Our observer saw them lying
about."

The guns are watching for the targets at all hours--the ever-hungry,
ever-ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically-calculating,
marvellously-accurate and also the guessing, wondering, blind,
groping, helpless guns, which toss their steel messengers over
streams, woodlands, and towns, searching for unseen prey in a wide
landscape.

Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a
trench wall or huddle in a dug-out as you hear an approaching
scream and the earth trembles and the air is wracked by a
concussion, and the cry of a man a few yards away tells of a hit. Very
accurate when still others, sent from muzzles six or seven thousand
yards distant, fall in that same line of trench! Very accurate when,
before an infantry attack, with bursts of shrapnel bullets they cut to
bits the barbed-wire entanglements in front of a trench! The power of
chaos that they seem to possess when the firing-trench and the dug-
outs and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are
beaten as flour is kneaded!

Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in a
field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not be
worth shooting at; when no one sees where the shells hit and the
amount of damage they have done is all guesswork; and helpless
without the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers
to see for them.

One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long
reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a
visible arm behind the blow. An army guards against the blows of an
enemy's demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception,
with all resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army
guards its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were
made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a
glance from the enemy's eye, instead of having barrels of the
strongest steel that can be forged.

Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in ratio to the
amount of hell s