I spent an afternoon in a dug-out there with a Colonel, a fine, hearty body of a man, while the shells passed almost continuously over our heads or burst noisily, with whizzing fragments of hot metal, in our immediate vicinity. He expressed himself very sagely on this question of shells. “Of course,” he said, “perpetual bombardment like this is a great strain on the men. But they are stout fellows, and they stand it all right. What does upset them, though, is the silence of our guns. My men see that a little energy on the part of our guns promptly reduces the Germans to silence. If we give the Germans shot for shot, and sometimes, for a change, two shells to their one, they become as meek as lambs. What my men lack is the heartening sound of our own shells. When our guns do retaliate, their fire is feeble, and soon dies away. A well-fed man is a better fighter than a fellow with an empty belly. So troops who know that they have the weight of metal behind them may be counted upon to make a better showing than men who feel that they are not properly supported.” But I do not intend to go further into the shell controversy here. Hooge showed us that the tide has turned. The shells which our guns fired that day were better than anything the gunners had ever seen before. The issue, in the Commander-in-Chief’s expressive phrase, is now between Krupp’s and Birmingham. Birmingham will win if England understands that, were every man left in England and every woman from this moment to give their services to the making of munitions of war, even then our Generals could not conscientiously say they were certain that the supply would be sufficient. In our former wars the gunners reaped the richest harvest of decorations, for they most often found themselves in a tight corner, and the rule of the Royal Artillery is, “Never lose a gun!” If you want a contrast between the war of movement and the war of positions, between August, 1914, and August, 1915, you have but to look at the gunners then, when the war was in the open, and now, when the belligerents have sat down to a siege. The foaming horses, the jingling accoutrements, the mud-bespattered guns, the gunners falling man by man about their gun--this splendid picture of war, painted on many a glorious page of our military history, has been replaced--temporarily, I know--by as strange a blend of peace and war as can be seen in the field to-day. Not that in the main the gunner’s task to-day is less perilous than before. Most of the shells that the Germans send over night and day are hunting for our batteries, searching for them principally with the aid of little maps provided by the German air observers. The Germans have to reckon with a resourceful lot of men in our gunners, however, and so skilfully are the guns hidden that more often than not the enemy’s projectiles plump harmlessly into fields, and cause no greater damage than the massacre of a few dozen buttercups and daisies.