There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. It would have been the same had Lord Kitchener been present. The battery commander expressed his regret that he could not show me his guns without any sense of irony; meaning that he was sorry he was too busy to tell me more about his battery. In about the time that it took a telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts, he knew whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of degree to make in the next if it were not; or if the word came to shift the point of aim a little, when you are trying to shake the enemy up here and there along a certain length of trench. At another wire-end some one was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he was in the kind of place where I once found an observer, who was sitting upon a cushion looking out through a chink broken in a wall, with a signal corps operator near by. It was a small chink, just large enough to allow the lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision; and even then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the chink was removed, though there could not have been any German in uniform nearer than four thousand yards. But there may be spies within your own lines, looking for such holes. From this post I could make out the German and the British trenches in muddy white lines of sandbags running snake-like across the fields, and the officer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and hedge and ditch in the panorama were graven on his mind; all had language for him. His work was engrossing. It had risk, too; there was no telling when a shell might lift him off the cushion and provide a hole for his remains. If he were shelled, the observer would go to a funk pit, as the gunners do, until the storm had passed; and then he would move on with his cushion and his telegraph instrument and make a hole in another wall, if he did not find a tree or some other eminence which suited his taste better. Meanwhile, he was not the only observer in that section. There were others nearer the trenches, perhaps actually in the trenches. The two armies, seeming chained to their trenches, are set with veiled eyes at the end of wires; veiled eyes trying to locate the other’s eyes, the other’s guns and troops, and the least movement which indicates any attempt to gain an advantage. “Gunnery is navigation, dead reckoning, with the spotting observer the sun by which you correct your reckoning,” said one of the artillery officers.