Howitzers of various calibres are in the background; in the foreground, guns of lighter types. Guns are like ships; each piece seems endowed with a personality which endears it to its creators. The soldiers to whose keeping they are sent feel a similar tenderness towards their own special charge. They express it by giving them fond names like “Saucy Sue,” “Sweet Seventeen,” “Jill Johnson,” “Our Lizzie,” and “’Ria.” [Illustration] LXVII THE NIGHT SHIFT WORKING ON A BIG GUN “A scene,” the artist writes, “so romantic in its mingling of grimness and mystery that one thinks with compunction of the long line of romantic artists whose lot it was not to have seen it!” The work on hand seems carried on by noiseless ghosts, so completely is the noise of their labours drowned by the incessant hum of machines. [Illustration] LXVIII SOME GREAT GUNS A sketch in the heavy gun bay. The size of these unmounted guns may be judged by the figures at work near them. [Illustration] LXIX MOVING HEAVY GUN TUBES This is a corner in the gun shop where heavy gun forgings of all sorts lie about, awaiting their turn on the machines. The overhead crane is lifting one of the guns. Many of these cranes are being driven by women. [Illustration] LXX A CORING MACHINE AT WORK ON A BIG GUN TUBE The big gun tube is rotating slowly while the tool inside scoops out long shavings of the metal like cheese parings. The mounting heaps of the metal shavings are constantly cleared away. The iridescent colours of these shavings (showing the different temperings of the steel) present surprisingly beautiful effects to the eye, tired with the bewildering rotations of the immense gun tubes on their machines. [Illustration] LXXI RUINS NEAR ARRAS Landscape near Arras is like the biblical vine hanging over a wall--“All the archers have shot at her.” Injured, but not yet destroyed, the woods seem like creatures scared, as if the trees themselves were possessed with the disquiet of dryads crouching somewhere in hiding. Many different parts of the front have their own almost personal expression, but it is seldom one of fear. At and around Arras this expression of alarm is so curiously strong that, if he transgressed prose, the visitor might fancy the taut bulrushes were nature’s hair standing on end, and a slight stir in the poplars her shudder. By some means, which a layman cannot mark down, Mr. Bone has suffused his drawing with his own sense of the tragic queerness of this vacuous and unnerved landscape. [Illustration] LXXII ON THE SOMME: IN THE OLD NO MAN’S LAND