rom other units as far back as three
months before. After a thorough ransacking and a feed that filled us to
our heart's content, we made for the battery, being greeted with a fresh
outburst on our arrival, and under the fire we pulled our remaining guns
away to another hedge 200 yards off, and waited for the storm to settle.

While lying there the brains of one of our geniuses got to working and
his ideas were quickly resolved into action. We went down to the barn,
took a couple of wagons, taking off the wheels and the poles, and made
up three dummy guns and placed them in the spot we had left, and in a
few minutes' time we had the satisfaction of seeing Fritz spend three or
four hundred good shells on our dummy battery.

A consuming thirst was parching my mouth and I took a chance and ran
along the open to the house for a drink. Then it was that the
disadvantageous side of our good work with the dummy guns was
exemplified; just as I was stepping out of the door, a shell tore a hole
in one corner of the building, knocking it out as clean as if it had
been drilled.

The customary methods employed by the Germans to get information as to
our guns, our troops, our supplies around Ypres, was to send a disguised
soldier to the different farmhouses and threaten them with instant
demolition by their guns if they did not furnish the information sought
for, and thus did Fritz make good his promise to the farmer. By reason
of our dummy guns and the strafing they got, and the fact that our guns
still were firing, he believed that the farmer had given him a bunco
steer, and he lost no time in making good his word.

Remaining in the hedge for a few hours, we dug holes for the guns,
covered them with tarpaulins and grass on top, giving them the usual
scenic shelter. We did this work in the open but only one man at a time
exposed; it was as much as life was worth for more than one to be seen
working. That evening, in the midst of our meal at cookhouse,--"Stand
to!" and we raced for our pets. When the concert was well under way,
Munsey noticed a light three or four hundred yards off that was acting
somewhat peculiarly; it would flare up and down oddly and seemed to be
in a farmhouse straight at our rear, but not much attention was paid to
it at the time. Next morning Munsey and I were in the cookhouse, trying
to moisten a couple of hardtack biscuits with what juice we could
extract from a piece of bacon rind, when an airplane hummed