Furthermore, a raid was to take place the same night and I hadn’t the foggiest idea of the numberless 4.5 differences. However we did our share in the raid and at the end of a couple of days I began to hope we should stick to howitzers. The reasons were many,--a bigger shell with more satisfactory results, gas as well as H.E., four guns to control instead of six, far greater ease in finding positions and a longer range. This was in October, ’17. Things have changed since then. The air recuperator with the new range drum and fuse indicator have made the 18-pounder a new thing. Two days after my going up the Hun found us. Between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. he sent over three hundred five-nines, but as they fell between two of the guns and the billet, and he didn’t bother to switch, we were perfectly happy. To my way of thinking his lack of imagination in gunnery is one of the factors which has helped him to lose the war. He is consistent, amazingly thorough and amazingly accurate. We have those qualities too, not quite so marked perhaps, but it is the added touch of imagination, of sportingness, which has beaten him. What English subaltern for instance up in that Hun O.P. wouldn’t have given her five minutes more right for luck,--and got the farm and the gun and the ammunition? But because the Boche had been allotted a definite target and a definite number of rounds he just went on according to orders and never thought of budging off his line. We all knew it and remained in the farm although the M.P.I. was only fifty yards to a flank. The morning after the raid I went the round of the guns. One of them had a loose breechblock. When fired the back flash was right across the gun pit. I put the gun out of action, the chances being that very soon she would blow out her breech and kill every man in the detachment. As my knowledge was limited to eighteen-pounders, however, I sent for the brigade artificer. His opinion confirmed mine. That night she went down on the tail of a wagon. The next night she came back again, the breech just as loose. Nothing had been done. The Ordnance workshop sent a chit with her to say she’d got to fire so many hundred more rounds at 4th charge before she could be condemned. What was the idea? Surely to God the Hun killed enough gunners without our trying to kill them ourselves? Assuming that a 4.5 cost fifteen hundred pounds in round figures, four gunners and a sergeant at an average of two shillings a day were worth economising, to say nothing of the fact that they were all trained men and experienced soldiers, or to mention that they were human beings with wives and families. It cannot have been the difficulty of getting another gun. The country was stiff with guns and it only takes a busy day to fire four hundred rounds. It was just the good old system again! I left the gun out of action.