Well, my business with the Battery Commander was to get on his right side and induce him to expend a certain number of rounds from his dear little guns that afternoon in cutting a nice line through the Boche entanglements opposite the extreme right of our line. It happened that, without interfering with the sort of sinking fund process by which the lords of the guns build up their precious reserves of ammunition, this particular lord was in a position to let us have a few rounds. Of course, our attitude towards the gunners is not always strictly reasonable, you know. We are for ever wanting them to spend ammunition, while their obvious duty is to accumulate ammunition greedily and all the time against the hours of real need, so that when these hours come they may simply let everything rip--take the lid right off. However, for reasons of their own, apart from mine, it happened fortunately that the gunners were not at all averse from giving that bit of the Boche line a mild pounding; and, accordingly, they promised us a nice neat lane on the extreme right by nightfall. We said nothing about the beautiful S-shaped lane on the extreme left, which Master Boche thought was known only to himself. Observe our extreme artfulness. We proceeded to train a grenade rifle on the extreme right, likewise a machine-gun. Then we proceeded to tell off our best bombers, and overhaul carefully a good supply of hand-grenades for use in the S-shaped opening on our extreme left. Until midnight there was a certain amount of moonlight, and for several hours we kept the Boche very busy on our extreme right, where, with a trifling expenditure of ammunition, the guns had cut a lane for us through his barbed wire. I've no doubt at all that Fritz had several machine-guns concentrated on that spot, and a bunch of rifle-men too. He made up his mind he would have the English on toast in that lane, and we encouraged him to think so. You know, at night-time it is not very easy to tell the difference between the explosion of a hand-grenade and that of a rifle-grenade. But whereas the hand-grenade could only be lobbed in from among the wire, the rifle-grenade could easily be sent over from our trench at that particular spot on our right. So we sent 'em over at all kinds of confusing intervals. And then, when Boche opened machine-gun fire across the lane, under the impression that our bombers were at work there, we replied with bursts of machine-gun fire on his parapet opposite the lane, thereby, I make no doubt, getting a certain number of heads. It is certain they would be looking out, and equally certain they would not be expecting fire from our trenches, when they thought we had our own bombers out there.