When heavy fighting is on, the battery, though it always preserves its outward calm, is a very busy place. When the guns concentrate during a preliminary bombardment, the gunners hardly get a moment to breathe, but keep on loading and firing, and loading and firing, while all the time fresh supplies of shells are brought up, and the piles of empty shell-cases, with their bronze burnt black at the edges, swell steadily. Then it is that the ammunition convoys stream together to the ammunition railheads, where shells, great and small, neatly packed in their wooden boxes, are lying in the goods-trains that have brought them up from the base. Soon after the fighting at Festubert in June, I spent a morning at an ammunition railhead. The officer in charge showed me round, a pleasant young man in very old riding-breeches and a khaki shirt, who had an office, a place of wonderful contrivances in the way of chairs and desks and pigeon-holes and shelves made out of empty shell-boxes, installed in a railway-truck. The railhead was established in a railway-siding, where, on three or four sets of metals, long trains were waiting, some full, others empty, about to return to the base to be replenished. The full trains contained the overflow. What can be safely stored is dumped out, and collected by the ammunition convoys--motor lorries of the Mechanical Transport--which come to the railhead daily to fetch supplies, in order to bring deplenished stocks up at the front to the normal level again. I saw, I believe, almost every form in which “villainous saltpetre digged out of the bowels of the harmless earth” is employed for the dismemberment of man. There were shells galore, from huge 4-foot howitzer shells in enormous coffin-like boxes, one to each, down to small 15-pounder shells, several to a case. There were hundreds of cases of bombs and grenades: stick-bombs, and round bombs, and square bombs; bombs for trench mortars, large and small; boxes of Verey flare-lights, and stacks of S.A.A.--that is, small arms ammunition, rifle and revolver cartridges. I was lost in admiration at the exquisite neatness of the packing--so contrived that by the simplest manipulation the shell and its charges can be lifted safely out of the box without hammering or violence of any kind. Every day the officer in charge sends in his returns of the amount of ammunition supplied, and the amount in hand. The returns for the preceding days of fighting in the Festubert region were eloquent of the part that artillery is playing in this war. The returns are made according to the size and description of shell.