is a hole in the ground.... You had better follow me about
twenty yards behind.... And keep low.... Make for the fifth
telegraph-pole from the left that you will see from the top."

He moved off. I waited and then followed, my mind concentrated at first
on the fifth telegraph-pole the colonel had spoken about. There was no
shelling at this moment. A bird twittered in a hedge close by; the
smell of grass and of clean earth rose strong and sweet. No signs or
sound of war; only sunshine and trees and----

The colonel's voice came sharp as whipcord. "Keep down!--keep down!" I
bent almost double and walked fast at the same time. My mind turned to
September 1916, when I walked along Pozieres Ridge, just before the
Courcellette fight, and was shouted at for not crouching down by my
battery commander. But there were shells abroad that day.... I almost
laughed to myself.

I tumbled after the colonel into the square hole that constituted the
"O.P."--it had been a Boche trench-mortar emplacement. The sweat
dripped down my face as I removed my tin hat; my hair was wet and
tangled.

Johns, a subaltern of D Battery, was in the pit with a couple of
telephonists. He was giving firing instructions to the battery.

"What are you firing at, Johns?" inquired the colonel, standing on a
step cut in the side of the pit, and leaning his elbows on the parapet.

"Two hundred yards behind that road, sir--trench mortars suspected
there, sir." He called, "All guns parallel!" down the telephone.

"Don't you keep your guns parallel when you aren't firing?" asked the
colonel quickly. "Isn't that a battery order?"

Johns flushed and replied, "No, sir.... We left them as they were after
night-firing."

"But don't you know that it is an Army order--that guns should be left
parallel?"

"Y-e-es, sir."

"Why don't you obey it, then?"

"I thought battery commanders were allowed their choice. I----"

The colonel cut poor Johns short. "It's an Army order, and has to be
obeyed. Army orders are not made for nothing. The reason that order was
made was because so many battery commanders were making their own
choice in the matter. Consequently there was trouble and delay in
'handing over.' So the Army made a standard ruling."

Then, as was always the case, the colonel softened in manner, and told
Johns to do his shooting just as if he were not looking on.

The new subaltern of A Battery suddenly lowered himself into the pit.
The colonel brightene