I remember also on that same line another regrettable incident. We had to render a certain report daily at a certain hour, and one day the headquarters line suddenly went out of action a few minutes before this time. The report was sent off by hand, and the linesman started on his weary journey of investigation. He reached the exchange eventually, testing every inch as he went, and found at last that the wire was not properly connected to the switchboard in the exchange itself. Now all this took some considerable time, and it was not till some hours later that a scared-looking telephonist found me in the battery and asked me to come to the telephone, as there was somebody at headquarters "a-carrying-on something hawful." So I went and found an infuriated and temporary officer demanding that I should immediately put all the telephonists under arrest and myself into the bargain--I think all the officers were included. Explaining that there might be difficulties in working the battery if those instructions were faithfully carried out, I asked what our crime had been. It then appeared that our messenger had arrived five minutes late with the report. I explained how this happened, pointed out that his own people at the exchange were to blame, and offered, should he consider mere arrest to be too trivial a punishment for men who had delayed the receipt of a purely routine report--it consisted of one word, nil!--by five minutes, to send him down a firing party at once. We never had any further trouble on that particular score. As an alternative to the telephone, it is sometimes possible to arrange relays of signallers with visual means of communication, such as lamps or signalling discs, a method very much more freely employed by the Germans than by ourselves. We established a chain of this nature along a line of a total length of about a mile and a half, as an emergency measure in case the wires should be cut, and on the occasion of a very critical moment when this disaster actually occurred, we found the system to work admirably. For general use, however, it is too slow and requires too many trained signallers. The telephone, in spite of all its peculiar idiosyncrasies, is the only method in practice it is possible to employ.