target is under
their projectiles.

The gunnery of 1915 seems almost amateurish to that of 1916, a fact
hardly revealed to the public by its reading of bulletins and of such a
quantity of miscellaneous information that the significance of it
becomes obscure. At the start of the war the Germans had the advantage
of many mobile howitzers and immense stores of high explosive shells,
while the French were dependent on their _soixante-quinze_ and shrapnel;
and at this disadvantage the brilliancy of their work with this
wonderful field gun on the Marne and in Lorraine was the most important
contributory factor in saving France next to the vital one of French
courage and organization. The Allies had to follow the German suit with
howitzers and high explosive shells and the cry for more and more guns
and more and more munitions for the business of blasting your enemy and
his positions to bits became universal.

The first barrage, or curtain of fire, ever used to my knowledge was a
feeble German effort in the Ypres salient in the autumn of 1914, though
the French drum fire distributed over a certain area had, in a sense, a
like effect. To make certain of clearness about fundamentals familiar to
those at the front but to the general public only a symbol for something
not understood, a curtain of fire is a swath of fragments and bullets
from bursting projectiles which may stop a charge or prevent reserves
from coming to the support of the front line. It is a barrier of death,
the third rail of the battlefield. From the sky shrapnel descend with
their showers of bullets, while the high explosives heave up the earth
under foot. Shrapnel largely went out of fashion in the period when high
explosives smashed in trenches and dugouts; but the answer was deeper
dugouts too stoutly roofed to permit of penetration and shrapnel
returned to play a leading part again, as we shall see in the
description of a charge under an up-to-date curtain of fire in another
chapter.

Counter-battery work is another one of the gunner-general's cares, which
requires, as it were, the assistance of the detective branch. Before you
can fight you must find the enemy's guns in their hiding-places or take
a chance on the probable location of his batteries, which will
ordinarily seek every copse, every sunken road and every reverse slope.
The interesting captured essay on British fighting methods, by General
von Arnim, the general in command of the Germans oppos