A mile or two from the battery headquarters at X---- Y---- was the observing station. The battery-major and myself were accompanied thither by a huge mastiff who in civil life was a dairyman by profession and turned a churn, but had long since attached himself to the major as orderly. We duly arrived at a deserted farm, but at this point the mastiff stopped dead and declined to come any further. I thought this churlish, and told him so, but he merely wagged his tail. When we entered the farmyard I understood. It was pitted with shell-holes, and they were obviously of very recent excavation. As a matter of fact the Huns suspected that farm, and with good reason, and treated it to intermittent "Hate." The mastiff therefore always waited for the battery-major at what it judged, quite erroneously, to be a safe distance. We clambered up into a loft by means of unreliable ladders. In the roof of the loft some tiles had been removed, and leaning our arms on the rafters we looked out. "You see that row of six poplars over there?" said the Major, pointing to a place behind the German trenches. I recognised them, for the same six poplars I had seen through a periscope in the trenches the day before. "Well, you see the roof of a house between the second and third tree from the right? Good!" He turned to the telephone operator in the corner of the loft. "Lay No. 2 on the register! Report when ready!" The operator repeated the words confidentially to the distant battery, and even as he spoke the receiver answered "Ready!" "Fire!" I had my eyes glued to the house, yet nothing seemed to happen, and I rubbed my field-glasses dubiously with my pocket-handkerchief. Had they missed? Even as I speculated there was a puff of smoke and a spurt of flame in the roof of the house between the poplars. We had delivered the goods.