“Yes,” said the officer; “we had no ditch during the fight with the Germans, and we were short of telephone wire for a while; so we had to carry messages back and forth as in the old days. It was a pretty warm kind of messenger service when the German _marmites_ were falling their thickest.” At length he stopped before a small mound of earth not in any way distinctive at a short distance on the uneven surface of the plateau. I did not even notice that there were three other such mounds. He pointed to a hole in the ground. I had been used to going through a manhole in a battleship turret, but not through one into a field-gun position before aeroplanes played a part in war. “_Entrez, monsieur!_” And I stepped down to face the breech of a gun whose muzzle pointed out of another hole in the timbered roof covered with earth. “It’s very cosy!” I remarked. “Oh, this is the shop! The living-room is below--here!” I descended a ladder into a cellar ten feet below the gun level, where some of the gunners were lying on a thick carpet of perfectly dry straw. “You are not doing much firing these days?” I suggested. “Oh, we gave the _Boches_ a couple this morning so they wouldn’t get cocky thinking they were safe. It’s necessary to keep your hand in even in the winter.” “Don’t you get lonesome?” “No, we shift on and off. We’re not here all the while. It is quite warm in our salon, monsieur, and we have good comrades. It is war. It is for France. What would you?” Four other gun positions and four other cellars like this! Thousands of gun positions and thousands of cellars! Man invents new powers of destruction and man finds a way of escaping them. As we left the battery we started forward, and suddenly out of the dusk came a sharp call. A young corporal confronted us. Who were we and what business had we prowling about on that hill? If there had been no officer along and I had not had a _laisser-passer_ on my person, the American Ambassador to France would probably have had to get another countryman out of trouble. The incident shows how thoroughly the army is policed and how surely. Editors who wonder why their correspondents are not in the front line catching bullets, please take notice.