ter of the guns. After the grim days of the salient, when he
worked with relics from fortresses and anything that could be improvised
against the German artillery, came the latest word in black-throated,
fiery-tongued monsters from England where the new gunners had learned
their ABC's and he and his assistants were to teach them solid geometry
and calculus and give them a toilsome experience, which was still more
useful.

His host kept increasing as more and more guns arrived, but never too
many. There cannot be too many. Plant them as thick as trees in a forest
for a depth of six or eight miles and there would not be enough by the
criterion of the infantry, to whom the fortunes of war increasingly
related to the nature of the artillery support. He must have smiled with
the satisfaction of a farmer over a big harvest yield that filled the
granary as the stack of shells at an ammunition depot spread over the
field, and he could go among his guns with the pride of a landowner
among his flocks. He knew all the diseases that guns were heir to and
their weaknesses of temperament. A gun doctor was part of the
establishment. This specialist went among the guns and felt of their
pulses and listened to accounts of their symptoms and decided whether
they could be cared for at a field hospital or would have to go back to
the base.

Temperament? An old eight-inch howitzer which has helped in a dozen
curtains of fire and blown in numerous dugouts may be a virtuoso for
temperament. Many things enter into mastery of the magic of the
thunders, from clear eyesight of observers who see accurately to
precision of gunner's skill, of powder, of fuse, of a hundred trifles
which can never be too meticulously watched. The erring inspector of
munitions far away oversea by an oversight may cost the lives of many
soldiers or change the fate of a charge.

Comparable only with the surgeon's skill in the skill which has life and
death as the stake of its result is the gunner's. The surgeon is trying
to save one life which a slip of the knife may destroy; the gunner is
trying both to save and to take life. In the gunner's skill life that is
young and sturdy, muscles that are hardened by exercise and drill,
manhood in its pink, must place its trust. A little carelessness or the
slightest error and monsters with their long, fiery reach may strike you
in the back instead of the enemy in front, and instead of dead and
wounded and capitulation among sm