But because I have thus seen the work of our guns in the field, because I have been allowed to penetrate the _arcana_ of gunnery, and to enter holy places where few save those of the craft are suffered to enter, I find myself in a dilemma. Despite the ceaseless activity of German spies in peace and war, there are still many blanks in the German information about our artillery. Far be it from me to fill them in! Permit me, therefore, to leave the guns hidden beneath their covers, cunningly stowed away from prying eyes in their emplacements. In a battery you get a good idea of the detachment of modern war. The effect of the war of positions is to hold off from the guns the rough-and-tumble of fighting. It happens occasionally, as in the case of the London Territorial “Heavies,” surrounded and captured during the second battle of Ypres, that the tide of battle sweeps up and washes round the guns. But as a general rule the guns, in their positions behind the front, are several miles from the actual firing-line. Their rôle is practically that of the artillery of a besieging force, and they thereby acquire a fixity of tenure which must be particularly sympathetic to the gunners who remember the awful ordeal of the guns on the retreat from Mons. A skilful fencer who has a good reach and a long foil can keep his opponent at a distance without moving his position, without losing his calm. The gunners in this war of positions are using a foil several miles long. Their blade is constantly in play, but the enemy is kept at arm’s length. Therefore, the life of the gunners is probably more ordered and stable than the life of any other formation at the front. In a London newspaper office some years ago I used to know a cable operator who on Saturday nights, when the wires were clear, was wont to pass the time by playing cable chess with the operators at Queenstown or New York. Many an evening I have sat by his side and watched him, poring over his chessboard, with one hand on the cable-key ready to transmit his move across the wires. The sense of long distance, which that quiet cable-room, with its shaded lights, its absorbed chess enthusiast, and its ticking instrument, used to convey, has come back to me in these batteries at the front, where death goes and comes over a stretch of miles. Among my notes of a visit to a battery of field-guns, I find the following observation: “The coolness, the savage _Sachlichkeit_ (a comprehensive German word which may be rendered by ‘business-likeness’) of the gunners; exposed to the constant menace of death at long range themselves, their one thought in life is to ‘get back’ at the enemy on the distant horizon.”