A scream sweeping past from our rear, and we knew that this was for the redoubt, as that was to have the first turn. A volume of dust and smoke breaking from the earth short of the redoubt; a second’s delay of hearing the engine whistle after the burst of steam in the distance on a winter day, and then the sound of the burst. The next was over. With the third the “heavy stuff” ought to be right on. But don’t forget that there was also an order for some “light stuff,” identified as shrapnel by its soft, nimbus-like puff which was scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working party as it hastened to cover. There you had the ugly method of this modern artillery fire: death shot downward from the air and leaping up out of the earth. Unhappily, the third was not on, nor the fourth--not exactly on. Exactly on is the way the British gunners like to fill an order f.o.b., express charges prepaid, for the Germans. Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting. It was not very good in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in developing accuracy. At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards’ range the shells were bursting thirty or forty yards away from where they should. No, not very good; the general murmured as much. He did not need to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for the shooting, who was in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He was the high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a gunner unless you are. Any good-enough temperament is ruled off wasting munitions. Red was creeping through the tan from his throat to the roots of his hair. To have this happen in the presence of that quiet-mannered general, after all his efforts to remedy the error in those guns! But the general was quite human. He was not the “strafing” kind. “I know those guns have an error!” he said, as he put his hand on the officer’s arm. That was all; but that was a good deal to the officer. Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men. The officer had suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride. Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep any general from being down-hearted. Neither guns, nor the powder which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the gunner, nor the adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the first shot, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from the target. “Right on!” And again and again--right on! The ugly, spreading, low-hanging, dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the same place. If the aeroplane’s conclusions were right, that wireless station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent. “Here, they are firing more than six!” said the general. “It’s always hard to hold gunners down when they are on the target like that.”