his long-range guns had ceased to fire. We talked seriously of
the war ending by Christmas. We laughed when I opened the first
Divisional message delivered at our new Headquarters: "Divisional
Cinema will open at Lieramont to-morrow. Performances twice daily, 3
P.M. and 6 P.M." "That looks as if our infantry are moving out," I
said.

We had taken over a bank and some shallow, aged dug-outs, occupied the
night before by our C Battery; and as there was a chill in the air that
foretold rain, and banks of sombre clouds were lining up in the western
sky, we unloaded our carts and set to work getting our belongings under
cover while it was still light. "There's no pit for you to dig in," the
colonel told me quizzingly, "but you can occupy yourself filling these
ammunition boxes with earth; they'll make walls for the mess." Hubbard
had been looking for something heavy to carry; he brought an enormous
beam from the broad-gauge railway that lay a hundred yards west of us.
The colonel immediately claimed it for the mess roof. "We'll fix it
centre-wise on the ammunition boxes to support the tarpaulin," he
decided. "Old Fritz has done his dirtiest along the railway," said
Hubbard cheerfully. "He's taken a bit out of every rail; and he's blown
a mine a quarter of a mile down there that's giving the sappers
something to think about. They told me they want to have trains running
in two days."

Meanwhile the signallers had been cleaning out the deep shaft they were
to work in; the cooks and the clerks had selected their own
rabbit-hutches; and I had picked a semi-detached dug-out in which were
wire beds for the colonel, Hubbard, and myself. True, a shell had made
a hole in one corner of the iron roof, and the place was of such
antiquity that rats could be heard squeaking in the vicinity of my
bed-head, but I hoped that a map-board fixed behind my pillow would
protect me from unpleasantness.

The colonel was suspicious of the S.O.S. line issued to us by Division
that night. The ordinary rules of gunnery provide that the angle of
sight to be put on the guns can be calculated from the difference
between the height of the ground on which the battery stands and the
height at the target. More often than not ridges intervene between the
gun and the target, and the height and position of these ridges
sometimes cause complications in the reckoning of the angle of sight,
particularly if a high ridge is situated close to the object to be shot