and
companionable, better suited for human association, less mechanically
brutal. They were not monstrous enough to require motor tractors to draw
them at a stately gait, but behind their teams could be up and away
across the fields on short notice, their caissons of ammunitions
creaking behind them. Along the communication trenches perspiring
soldiers carried "plum puddings" or the trench-mortar shells which were
to be fired from the front line and boxes of egg-shaped bombs which
fitted nicely in the palm of the hand for throwing.

It seemed that all the guns in the world must be firing as you listened
from a distance, although when you came into the area where the guns
were in tiers behind the cover of a favorable slope you found that many
were silent. The men of one battery might be asleep while its neighbor
was sending shells with a one-two-three deliberation. Any sleep or rest
that the men got must be there in the midst of this crashing babel from
steel throats. Again, the covers were being put over the muzzles for the
night, or, out of what had seemed blank hillside, a concealed battery
which had not been firing before sent out its vicious puffs of smoke
before its reports reached your ears. Every battery was doing as it was
told from some nerve-center; every one had its registered target on the
map--a trench, or a road, or a German battery, or where it was thought
that a German battery ought to be.

The flow of ammunition for all came up steadily, its expenditure
regulated on charts by officers who kept watch for extravagance and
aimed to make every shell count. A fortune was being fired away every
hour; a sum which would send a youth for a year to college or bring up a
child went into a single large shell which might not have the luck to
kill one human being as excuse for its existence; an endowment for a
maternity hospital was represented in a day's belch of destruction from
a single acre of trodden wheat land. One trench mortar would consume in
an hour plum puddings for an orphan school. For you might pause to think
of it in this way if you chose. Thousands do at the front.

Down on the banks of the Somme the blue uniforms of the French in place
of the British khaki hovered around the gun-emplacements; the
_soixante-quinze_ with its virtuoso artistic precision was neighbor to
the British eighteen-pounder. Guns, guns, guns--French and English! The
same nests of them opposite Gommecourt and at Estrees thundere