The position of the artillery immediately becomes clear, when the lie of the ground is once grasped. For field artillery enfilade fire is far most effective, as the trajectory is lower than that of heavy artillery. That is to say, a whizz-bang (the name given to an 18-lb. shell) more or less skims along the ground and comes _at_ you; whereas howitzers fire up in the air, and the shell rushes down on top of you. To be explicit at the risk of boring:-- If a battery of eighteen-pounders can fire up a trench like this:-- [Illustration: (_a_)] it has far more effect against the nine men in that trench than if it fires like this: [Illustration: (_b_)] The same applies of course to howitzers, but as howitzers drop shells down almost perpendicularly, they can be used with great effect traversing along a trench, that is to say, getting the exact range of the trench in sketch (_b_), and dropping shells methodically from right to left, or left to right, so many to each fire-bay, and dodging about a bit, and going back on to a bit out of turn so that the enemy cannot tell where the next coal-box is coming. Oh! it is a great game this for the actors, but not for the unwilling audience. So you can see now why a battery of field artillery was stationed in the gully called Gibraltar, and another just west of Albert (at B): each of these batteries could bring excellent enfilade fire on to the German trenches. There was another battery that fired from the place I have marked C, and another at D. The howitzers lived in all sorts of secret places, as far back as Morlancourt some of them. One never worried about them. They knew their own business. Once, in June, on our way into the trenches we halted close by a battery at E, and I looked into one of the gun-pits and saw the terrible monster sitting with its long nose in the air. And I saw the great shells (it was a 9·6) waiting in rows. But I felt like an interloper, and fled at the approach of a gunner. All these howitzers you see firing on the Somme films, we never saw or thought about; only we loved to hear their shells whistling and “griding” (if there is no such word, I cannot help it: there is an “r” and a “d” in the sound anyway!) over our head, and falling “crump,” “crump,” “crump” along the German support trenches. There were a lot of batteries in the Bois des Tailles; the woods were full of them, and grew fuller and fuller. I do not know what they all were.