ers who have made hundreds
of appearances in the same act on the stage.

All ready, the word given, a thunder peal and through the air you saw
a wingless, black object in a faint curve against the soft blue sky,
which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of
water through a break in the garden hose multiplied by ten, rising to
its zenith and then descending, till it passed out of sight behind a
green bank of foliage on the horizon.

After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint,
thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of
steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the
gunners' part in chessboard war, where the moves are made over
signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches
and fight in their charges in the traverses of trenches at as close
quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers.

There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. It
would have been the same had Lord Kitchener been present. The
battery commander expressed his regret that he could not show me
his guns without any sense of irony; meaning that he was sorry he
was too busy to tell about his battery. In about the time that it took a
telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts, he knew
whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of
degree to make in the next if it were not; or, if the word came, to shift
the point of aim a little, when you are trying to shake up the enemy
here and there along a certain length of trench.

At another wire-end someone was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he
was in the kind of place where I found one observer, who was sitting
on a cushion looking out through a chink in a wall, with a signal corps
operator near by. It was a small chink, just large enough to allow the
lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision; and even
then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the chink
was removed, though there could not have been any German in
uniform nearer than four thousand yards. But there may be spies
within your own lines, looking for such holes.

From this post I could make out the British and the German trenches
in muddy white lines of sandbags running snake-like across the fields,
and the officer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and
hedge and ditch in the panorama were graven on his mind; all had
language for him. His work was engrossing