One of the improvements in our field organisation since the early part of the war is the more general provision of hot meals for the men in the front trenches. From cookhouses like the one shown in the drawing, or from travelling field kitchens, the hot stew and tea are brought up the communication trench in dixies, two to a platoon, each dixie being slung from a pole carried on two men’s shoulders. The cooks work under shell fire and many have been killed. [Illustration] XLIV THE GUN PIT: HARDENING THE STEEL The drawing shows one of the most thrilling moments in the making of a great gun. The doors of the furnace have just been thrown back and the heated gun tube is about to be lifted by the giant pincers of the crane. [Illustration] XLV THE GUN PIT: A GUN JACKET ENTERING THE OIL TANK The gun jacket shown here has just been heated in the furnace and is about to plunge into its oil bath. The spectacle is always striking, especially at dusk, when the fierce glow of the huge mass of metal seems more brilliant than ever. The passage is made in a few seconds. [Illustration] XLVI THE GUN PIT: THE GREAT CLUTCHES OF THE CRANE The figures in the foreground give a scale by which to judge the size and power of the crane that handles the heavier guns in the gun pit. The tube has now been lifted from the oil tank and waits to be carried back to the gun shop lathes. [Illustration] XLVII MOUNTING A GREAT GUN This is one of the largest guns. At such a scene as its mounting one is always struck by the contrast between the restless stir of the minute figures busy about it and the massive impassivity--for the present--of the thing they have created. “A great gun,” it has been said, “is so _sheer_.” In a gun shop it dwarfs everything round it and seems the embodiment, at the same time, of immobility and of menace. [Illustration] XLVIII “THE HALL OF THE MILLION SHELLS” A store containing loaded shells of every calibre. All the plant has been made since 1914, in answer to the challenge of German militarism. The railway trucks in the foreground are incessantly filled and refilled from the supplies pouring into the store for dispatch to the front. Women drive the cranes that gather up bunches of shells from any part of the building and lower them, with absolute precision, to their appointed places in the trucks. All handling of shells must be cautious and deliberate, but the work proceeds, without haste and without rest, at a remarkable speed. [Illustration] XLIX THE RUINED TOWER OF BÉCORDEL-BÉCOURT The village of Bécordel-Bécourt is just on the Allies’ side of the front line as it was before the Battle of the Somme. It has, therefore, sustained only the German artillery fire, not that of both armies in turn. Hence the survival of this comparatively large fragment of the village church. [Illustration] L EMBARKING THE WOUNDED _Sketched at night at a Port of embarkation of the wounded._