This studied efficiency in the business of slaying is indeed the dominant impression left on the mind by a view of one of these batteries in action. The officers, always neat and trim, are nonchalant and laconic as they snap out in monosyllables the orders that carry with them winged death; the men serving the gun--just a handful of dust-coloured figures about some ironwork--go about their work swiftly and silently. A word with the telephone orderly as to range and angle and shell, a brisk order, a yellow-painted shell is whipped smartly out of its neat _caisson_ standing open by the gun, its doors flung wide like two arms, as though to say, “Help yourself!” there is a snapping and a clicking of bolts and blocks, then the voice of the sergeant: “All ready to fire, sir!” The gun is laid on its quarry. No gun fires without an object. Somewhere in the sun-bathed flats beyond, where the horizon is smudged in blue behind a curtain of dancing heat, there are men whose glass of life is all but run out. How often have I thought on this picture, in the few seconds’ interval between that short phrase, “All ready to fire, sir!” and the brisk command: “No. 1 gun, fire!” ... A group of Germans, not the fierce helmeted Huns in exquisitely neat uniforms that our artists love to show us in the illustrated papers, but vague figures in ill-fitting dirty grey that makes them look like scavengers, with trousers, showing a band of white lining, turned up over their boots, curiously long tunics unbuttoned at the throat, and little round caps, all stained with mud and sweat, their heads beneath shaved until the skin shows greyish through the pale stubble--a group of vague Unknowns waiting for death. Perhaps they are walking up a communication trench, plodding in Indian file, silent; maybe they are sitting outside a dug-out talking of the things which form the staple conversation of the men on both sides out here--their food, their duties, their spell of rest from the trenches, their leave, their sergeant. All are marked down by the Power that regulates these things--those that are to die, those that shall survive. Even now one is taking that step forward that shall save his life, another has tarried an instant, and for that instant’s delay he shall die. The cigarette that the officer in our battery is lighting shall give the doomed ones a few seconds’ respite. The shell is in the gun, bearing in its shining and beautifully turned case that which shall release a never-ending succession of events springing from the widows and orphans which this shot shall make. In a second now it will be sped, in another second its work will be done. There will be telegrams--ill-omened and feared visitants in these days of war--arriving in German homes, in the officer’s flat on the third-floor of a dull street in a garrison town, in the tenement dwelling in a Berlin slum, in a farm in Pomerania, in a wooden cottage on a pine slope in the Black Forest.