“A good spot!” I said. “Is it well hidden?” “As safe as houses,” said the captain of the battery. “Touching wood, I mean.” There were six of us sitting at a wooden plank on trestles, and at those words five young men rose with a look of fright on their faces and embraced the beam supporting the roof of the barn. “What's happened?” I asked, not having heard the howl of a shell. “Nothing,” said the boy, “except touching wood. The captain spoke too loudly.” We went out to the guns which were to do a little shooting, and found them camouflaged from aerial eyes in the grim desolation of the battlefield, all white after a morning's snowstorm, except where the broken walls of distant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill showed black as ink. The gunners could not see their target, which had been given to them through the telephone, but they knew it by the figures giving the angle of fire. “It's a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench,” said a bright-eyed boy by my side (he was one of the rising hopes of Fleet Street before he became a gunner officer in Flanders). “With any luck we shall get 'em in the neck, and I like to hear the Germans squeal... And my gun's ready first, as usual.” The officer commanding shouted through a tin megaphone, and the battery fired, each gun following its brother at a second interval, with the staccato shock of a field-piece, which is more painful than the dull roar of a “heavy.” A word came along the wire from the officer in the observation post a mile away. Another order was called through the tin mouthpiece. “Repeat!” “We've got'em,” said the young gentleman by my side, in a cheerful way. The officer with the megaphone looked across and smiled. “We may as well give them a salvo. They won't like it a bit.” A second or two later there was a tremendous crash as the four guns fired together. “Repeat!” came the high voice through the megaphone. The still air was rent again... In a waterlogged trench, which we could not see, a German pumping-party had been blown to bits. The artillery officers took turns in the observation posts, sleeping for the night in one of the dugouts behind the front trench instead of in the billet below. The way to the observation post was sometimes a little vague, especially in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts of the communication trenches slithered down under the weight of sand-bags. The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and eager step found it necessary to crawl on his stomach before he reached his lookout station from which he looked straight across the enemy's trenches. But, once there, it was pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct hit from above or a little mining operation underneath. He made a seat of a well-filled sand-bag (it was rather a shock when he turned it over one day to get dry side up and found a dead Frenchman there), and smoked Belgian cigars for the sake of their aroma, and sat there very solitary and watchful.