Romer Williams and I walked from our château to a "Mother" gun, concealed under a screen of dry branches in a near-by farmyard. The big 9·2 howitzer was throwing its 290-pound projectiles, filled with lyddite, into the Hun trenches in front of Hooge, nearly 9,000 yards distant. The five-mile journey was accomplished by each shell in 35 seconds, a rate of more than 500 miles per hour. Dodging a shell which was coming at such speed would be something of a feat. Yet, standing directly behind the breech, we could distinctly see the 9·2 shell as it left the muzzle and started on its sinister errand. For so huge an engine of war its paraphernalia was simple. The howitzer stood on a platform built into the farmyard. Rows of shells, each a load for four men, lay in a ditch behind it. On a log, under a tall tree, sat the captain gunner, by his side a non-com. busy figuring out mathematical equations, and another poring over a large-scale map. With his back to the tree crouched a Royal Flying Corps man, his receiver to his ear, and an elaborate box of wireless telegraphic tricks beside him. Across the road a slender pole, a score of feet in height, completed his wireless installation. "Fire!" said the captain, sharply. Flash! bang! "Mother" recoiled with a shock and returned leisurely. Not a big noise or a very trying one on the ears of those near by, unless in front of the "business end." The crew stood close at hand as each round was fired. Before an unsophisticated onlooker would imagine the great shell had reached its destination, the wireless man, listening attentively to the message from an aeroplane observer high over the Huns, and out of our sight, sang out "150 yards over." A cabalistic sequence of numbers was shouted in staccato tones by one of the non-coms, repeated by a man at the breech, and flash! bang! went "Mother" again. "Well placed. Right into them," said the wireless operator, as the approving message was ticked from his fellow in the 'plane. Flash! bang! the work went on, comforting the battered men in our own trenches, and harrying the Germans in theirs. "Had nine direct hits on their trenches yesterday," said the captain gunner, "and have got the range pretty well to-day. Managed to get a couple into one of the German batteries this morning, too." And he grinned. If the men who made the shells could have known how much heart every 9·2 projectile put into the brave boys that faced the Hun trenches, weary to distraction of everlasting German shelling, and little return thereto, they would have been justly proud of their handiwork. A "Mother" shell was a fine tonic for those who were behind it, "when it popped."